Wednesday, October 01, 2008

What Happened on the Train

A few things happened on the train Tuesday morning.

1) I started reading again.
A Book of Common Prayer is my favorite of Joan Didion's novels, and whenever I've been struggling with concentration, with having no interest in anything written, with the desire to disappear into the games on my iPod--which I have been doing for the last 6-8 weeks--I go back to this novel. Every time I read it, I find new things, or things I'd forgotten re-appear. Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator, is stronger this time for me than she's ever been before; perhaps foolishly, I always thought it was a novel about Charlotte Douglas. Perhaps this is what happens when you read a good novel--but I started wondering if Grace and I are any different. We, Grace and I, seem to view the world as an accumulation of evidence. I could be projecting this on Grace, as well. I still feel that it's true.

2) I reconsidered my notion of bandwidth.
The circus takes up all of my energy: emotional, physical, creative. It uses up all my patience. It uses up all my critical-thinking skills, my sense of aesthetics, my concentration, my ability to simply decide between the lemonade or the Coca-Cola. This is not the first time I've discovered this, but it seems that every year I am re-learning it anew, as if part of what drives me (us?) forward year after year is the ability to forget what happened last year. There must be some medical term for this, some psychological condition--I think it has to do with the drug making you forget the reasons you need it, or something--although this drug is a hugely-important, amazing part of my creative and social existence. Not damaging, just exhausting. Anyway, all these things are the facts of the situation, without interpretation. And most of me would rather leave this story at that. Because, for me, the facts are the interpretation. (Just like Grace in A Book of Common Prayer.)

The other part of this idea of running out of bandwidth, was that, feeling all these things that the circus makes you feel, (plus a huge sense of accomplishment and joy,) I thought again about this argument I'm always having in my head with Virginia Woolf. "A Room of One's Own vs. The Truth of Modern Life." Think of working mothers, I always say. Think of those refugees who write memoirs in crowded, foul-smelling camps covered in barbed wire. (Hers always felt a bit like the argument delivered from a place of leisure. But yesterday I began thinking that maybe she's right. Maybe I'm being a bit too too.) I've not written anything of any substantial merit in months because I just didn't have any room of my own. My brain was full, the bandwidth had expired. Okay, Virginia, you win this one. For now.

3) The writing came back.
Poof, like magic. The words aren't pouring out of my fingers yet, which is the real work, of course, but the sounds of my characters talking, the textures of their pants, the lengths of their dress hems, the leafy, worn ends of magazines stacked by the toilets--all that came back. Quietly, insistently, easily. As if the fog just blew away.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, there is a phenomenon known as "intentional forgetting" that is described in an article in the June 2005 issue of the journal Memory & Cognition. The authors state, "Can a person deliberately forget an autobiographical event? Intentional forgetting has often been used to explain the loss of autobiographical memories, especially memories for unpleasant or disturbing events." But maybe your forgetting is more unintentional--rather like the mother who forgets painful childbirth which allows her to have another baby later on. That is another phenomenon all its own--see the March 2002 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

parting the seams said...

i actually looked for _the book of common prayer_ last week when i was killing time in a 2nd hand bookstore hoping to find a copy of amitav ghoshs's _the shadow lines_. alas, i found neither. i left with an old biography of ezra cornell called _the builder_ and marjorie garber's _vested interests_. recently, i've been longing to read fiction and poetry again. sigh.

Anonymous said...

I was going to leave a comment, and then I got caught up in your librarian mom's comment, and then I thought how lucky you are to have a librarian mom who is sending you citations!! I'm envious.

Some amount of forgetting is good, as your mom says. The reverse -- no forgetting -- is pathological. There was a show on NPR this summer about a woman who remembers everything autobiographical, and she has a hard time living her present life, because her past is always insisting at her. Nothing recedes: no pain, no event.

Your writing about forgetting Circus connects somehow with your recent post on your friend Meg's death, your memory, and how memory fades. It does for me anyway.