23 January 2007 | Circle
My sister Andrea and I visited the circle yesterday. The circle is where we grew up; it’s a cul-de-sac. We were driving to Target to return her vacuum cleaner when Andrea suggested a quick side trip.
We parked in front of Bruce Goldberg’s house. Bruce doesn’t live there anymore, none of the Goldbergs do, but I still think it as Bruce Goldberg’s house.
One time when we were kids, Bruce’s sister Rhonda, who was fat, sat on Andrea, who was tiny, and Rhonda refused to budge. I can’t remember why Rhonda did this, but someone told me about it while it was happening and I came running. Andrea and Rhonda were on the lawn in front of Bruce Goldberg’s house (which naturally I thought of Bruce Goldberg’s lawn), surrounded by a crowd of kids, many of whom who were yelling and pointing.
I would like to report that I made Rhonda get off my sister, but instead I simply stood there laughing. It was Bruce who pulled her off.
Also, Bruce’s father is the person who told me my first dirty joke. It happened in Bruce’s kitchen as Bruce and I sat at the kitchen table, eating something. Bruce’s father stood by the counter, drinking a beer, and simply started telling us a joke which from the beginning was not like any joke I’d ever heard before. Actually I’m not certain about the beer; that may be a detail I added later. But I remember the joke exactly as Bruce’s father told it to me. The punch line included the word tits, which was an amazing word for an adult to say, in a joke or otherwise.
I believe Bruce became a doctor, but I have no clue what happened to Rhonda. Their mother died recently, of cancer. I don’t remember her at all, which strikes me as almost shameful. How many times did I see her walk in or out of Bruce Goldberg’s house? A thousand? Five thousand? I can’t even remember the color of her hair.
Andrea and I made a circuit of the street, reminiscing about the inhabitants of each house. (By inhabitants, I of course mean former inhabitants.) It’s always so strange to return to that street again. Everything is so much smaller than I remember. Naturally I tell myself to expect it to be smaller, and yet each time I’m surprised by how small it is. For some reason I can’t reduce my expectations enough to match an ever-diminishing reality. Also, the houses keep moving closer together. In memory there’s enough room between each house to fit in an additional house, but those spaces are nearly gone now. It’s as though the circle is continually contracting, houses and all.
And the people are gone as well. That’s what strangest of all—the fact that the circle is inhabited by usurpers who don’t even realize they’re usurpers. As we headed back to the car, Andrea and I watched a bald man stroll into Bruce Goldberg’s house. Naturally I realize that Bruce and his family left that house over twenty-five years ago, and yet it still confused me to watch this stranger act as though he owned not only Bruce Goldberg’s house but everything inside the house, including, for all I know, the kitchen table where I sat listening to Bruce Goldberg’s father tell me my first dirty joke.
Oh, the lawn. The bald man believed—you could tell this—that he owned Bruce Goldberg’s lawn.
19 January 2007 | Story
I know a woman who can only come from words—or rather, from stories. These stories are always about people coming. She reads them and comes. Naturally she touches herself as she reads, but the stories are primary: they make her want to touch herself.
15 January 2007 | Music
The opening is there but he cannot go through, so instead he goes part way through, which only makes him want to go farther, which he cannot do, and so, like a person in a line that is not moving and will not move, he takes a tiny step forward, moving that tiny step closer to the person in front of him, who in turn moves a tiny step closer to the person in front of her, that person being him, for there are only two people in line.
It’s like a game of musical chairs. They walk in slow circles around a single chair, waiting for the music only they can hear, for it is in their heads, to stop. They do not want this music to stop, nor do they want to stand in line any longer, for they know it leads nowhere, and yet this is how this particular game is played. When the music stops, as stop it must, neither wins anything.
09 January 2007 | Window
Everything we experience is recorded and stored in our brains. I believe I read this many years ago in a science magazine. You might be sitting in a chair, looking out the window, and all the while your brain is silently registering and recording what it feels like to sit in that chair, the feeling of the chair on your butt and the backs of your legs, the pressure of it, as well as everything you see and hear while sitting, things you don’t necessarily even notice, consciously. Actually I saw this on TV. There was a man on an operating table with a sawed-open head. The sawed-opened part had been flipped over and was resting on top of his head. The hinge of this flap (flap is probably the best word for it) was made of skin. A surgeon touched the man’s exposed brain with a pointer that was connected to what looked like a giant car battery. Each time the surgeon did this, he asked the man to say whatever entered his mind. (Yes, the man was conscious during this procedure—in fact, he had to be conscious, or there would be no point in sawing his head open.) Each time the man’s brain was stimulated, he would remember some random, inconsequential experience, like, say, sitting in a chair and looking out the window. I honestly don’t believe I dreamed this. What amazed me was the unconscious part: that the man would remember things he wasn’t aware of when they happened, that everything had been recorded and could be replayed, assuming one could find the play button.
Thinking about this now, I don’t know what the point of all this remembering is. It seems that when everything is remembered, memory is reduced to a mishmash of minutia. Ideally we should only remember what matters to remember, and only forget what matters to forget. It’s impossible of course, because what matters changes, and anyway who’s to say what matters, but still this seems the ideal. Although maybe we already do this, in our fashion, without knowing. This being the work of the unconscious: to choose what matters to remember and to forget (with remember and forget in quotes, of course) and to do so in the background, silently, as we sit in our chairs and look out the window.
