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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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sense and memory
About a week ago Max and I rented a few movies. "Dance with a Stranger," "The Draughtsman's Contract," "A Sacrifice," "Feed," and "Afterlife." Of these, I enjoyed the last the most. "Afterlife" is a japanese film about a group of people who have died and end up in a place where they have a week to choose the memory that they want to spend eternity in. That is, they pick this memory knowing that this is the memory that they will take with them into eternity. Everything else they will have to forget. The idea, in the hands of a typical american filmmaker, would be so much sentimental mush. Unwatchable. But the film that I saw was interestingly unsentimental--or at least restrained in its sentiment. It made me wonder what goes into the making of a memory, and it made me think about what my memory would be if I had to choose. Nearly every memory I came up with was set outdoors. I thought about the summer when we had first gotten Shelly, and I would go outside to feed him and then sit on the banged up green wicker chair beneath the acacia with the monster-in-the-yard in my lap, watching Shelly emerge from his little stone house to breakfast on snails and earthworms and strawberries. I thought about sitting on the hilltop in Kakadu, the unreal landscape unrolled out beneath me, the sun just beginning to think about setting. I had my journal open on my knees and I was writing. I was writing about writing, writing about Liz and her binoculars, writing about the plane buzzing overhead, writing about the dreamlike quality of a moment that felt so real only because it was real. I thought about the morning Max and I walked through the old growth sequoia forest in the mist, the trees towering over us, the trail snaking ahead and behind us. I felt real, as if I existed, because everything about that moment was right: the size of the trees, how the air felt on my skin, the memory of breathing, and Max walking along near me. We took pictures of ourselves hugging trees for Malarka. We ran into a gaggle of unimpressed schoolchildren trotting along the trail with their chaperones. They were wearing nametags. They were wearing nametags in the forest which seemed a little touching and ridiculous both. I might take that last memory, with only a few reservations. I would take that last memory, but I would know that I had taken it without searching well enough for a memory that had my mother in it. Or a memory that somehow contained an instant of the childhood me in it. I know that I couldn't bear to forget entire summer days spent playing Monopoly with my brothers in the sideyard of the house we all grew up in, or my grandmother's hands as she poured sugar from one container into another or rolled out tortillas on the countertop. I couldn't leave behind first kisses, first touches, warm skin. I couldn't leave behind laughter, the taste of good chocolate, the terrible feeling of a broken heart. I couldn't leave behind snow, long baths, even longer nights. I couldn't even leave behind the hum of fluorescent lights, the pain of ill-fitting shoes, the embarrassment of recitals. I couldn't do it.
More lies:
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