In Search of Lost Time

The Evergreen State College

Author: zavste27

Another Close Reading

May 13, 2015 /

Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

13 May 2015

Proust on Music (pages 334-37; 339-340)

Throughout this part of the book the narrator focuses immensely on Art– it’s form, function, and the skilled people who create it. In these passages Marcel is at the Verdurins’, having lied to Albertine so he could go alone. He discusses love and explains his theory on how jealousy begets lying to a lover, and how subsequently that wounds the strength of union between two hearts because the notion of consenting to lie or mislead one’s partner tarnishes the purity of the relationship (295). The primary instigator of these thoughts of mistrust and these desires to be untruthful are feelings of jealousy. Jealousy, however, merely sets the stage for the actual catalyst of division; it’s the lying afterward that ruins the bond between two hearts.

While the narrator is listening to the deceased composer Vinteuil’s music being played, he is finding out that art can be more than something beautiful; it can be transcendental (340). This quality, which he is experiences through Vinteuil’s compositions, can allow people to experience hundreds of lifetimes, of feelings, across the stars (343). He finds in the music his phrase for his feelings about Albertine, the love, the pain, the contradiction of his feelings is expressed in the variations of rhythm and tone in a song, an expression of emotion that doesn’t use words or colours but can convey them through an entirely different form—sound (336-7).

This made me think back on the importance of Swann and Odette’s phrase, and how art in general is portrayed as influencing so many aspects of life; social standing, emotions, physical and mental well-being (Mme. Verdurin is a good example I think of a person who is affected physically by music), and can serve as a way to immortalize one’s individuality, like Proust said about Vinteuil and Elstir’s work on page 339. He expounds on the idea of art being a means to prevent oneself from vanishing into the past, and he says that because life encompasses experiences artists are only able to keep fragments alive, intimations of their individuality because experiences are separated by their own starts and stops, we can’t remember the entire summation of our experiences in a fluid way because memories are something like immersed in an ocean of existence, of time, so when we hear or see some masterpiece, we can get carried on a wave of what the artist is in that sand-dollar memory we find in opening up to experience great art (339-40). The, “…proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul.“ (341) lay in the artist’s “habitual speculation” and their own ability to express with an exactitude that is similar to a totally individual accent, the voice of their soul and existence through creating a piece of art which moves people into feeling who they were at the moment of composition.

Linking this notion of preserving oneself in fragments, as memories which other people can maybe access on their own person level to the theme of time and it’s anachronistic, choppy, nature is interesting to me. Proust compares sounds to colours, images to songs and this aids in effectively translating an observation on why creating is important, how it takes us back and into another time, place, world, and can influence future perceptions of experiences by the memory of what that art imparted—they are memories which aren’t our own but which we internalize and interpret within ourselves, which makes it ours. We are not lost at sea, we are droplets of the same ocean, no matter which wave we comprise.

The Midnight Ballerinas(but like not done)

May 6, 2015 /

Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

6 May 2015

                                                           The Midnight Ballerinas

Chapter One: The Place

The middle-class thread count of the sheets on her bed made an elegant effort to trace my skin, one of the only parts of my body which hasn’t aged the same as the rest of me. I make more money when I let them touch my skin; I learned about touch and its grace. Lovely, soft, there are tingles on my stomach and that light part on my… sides. Grace and disgrace. Foreign and foul, the beauty of something so carnal when it happens and leaves the lingering sting that makes me hope I dry out and crumble like dead laves underfoot because it is taken and not a gift, an asset of lust-slaking, faking moods to appeal to that throbbing I go to

grab

touch

A grace like women administering poison.

It’s dim inside because it’s lit up like midnight and sunset and Christmas lights. Wrapped around those old carpeted pillars, the ones you see when you’re broke and desperate for a place to stay to uncramp stiffened legs from driving and sleeping in the trunk of your car, those square beams always grayish mauve in centrally inconvenient middles of Super 8 motel lobbies, have dusty once-white rope-lights. Vaguely imply that they ‘wish you to execute caution when navigating through this toolshed cluttered space.’ It’s full of empty chairs, like flimsy cookware from the dollar store- new maybe, but looking so used they defy the natural half-life decay most elements possess, even though no one, not even the owner, can remember the time they were hauled in and displayed as furniture.

All we ever really remember about it is it’s small and dark and the airs is broken into levels of heavy and light, so that sometimes we get light-headed from how thinly we breathe and other times our limbs are pressed into ourselves, concentrated and unconsenting.

The green bar straw she twirls in her mouth always, as much a prop as it is a tool and no one has really noticed or cared that it gets shorter after each bathroom trip or the way she gently sniffs; the drips. Coke, she says, tastes a little like mustard powder or something, it’s bitter and sustains its flavor in the numb halitosis of the back of her throat. It gets thick there, coating her tonsils working like vapor rub, icy hot compress of conduct; [something]

I’ve only known new girls to remember their first day stripping. We don’t forget it but it blends into so many other times when there’s a first and then another and never an end.  It’s cold or hot and hopefully you’ve gotten fixed enough to lie, first to those men and then to yourself. [Don’t you like it?] And with the buzzing tone of being stoned and such gourmet music you want to take everything off and no you don’t it’s gone and here is this dirty stage and that oily Mexican man with his sweaty palms, that thud and throb first heard in his chest but then is everywhere.

Green straw, bathroom stall.

Someone left their drink in there and now it’s empty.

Those Christmas lights are bigger and glow with angel’s halos and sparkles falling twinkling like God’s-eye smiles

I like it when you spank me hard– sometimes she thinks of her boyfriend, but not always. It feels good. Clammy hand that stutters, sticking touch glitches at the momentary friction…Because it finds that complimentary damp between those legs

Just victims of an in-house driveby

They say jump and you say how high

Want it?!

 

A groan. He likes knowing his lap is making her wet. That extra dollar for the jukebox was worth it because it pays off tenfold for a lie neither can tell is fake or not. Still nascent music channels through something like a straw into her head and the man is faceless and nothing and somehow everything she wants fits in the chair that is too small to dance for so you dance on it, within it, pushing the cushions so her knees fit in with a forgettable half-second protest

Yes yes yes turn it around wind it back down feel it all coming so close that she don’t remind herself or anyone of the love that we’re all missing out on

We all know love is what we’re missing out on.

Oh baby, you know I’ve always liked girls and touching them, feeling such soft skin

Lovey, you forgot the song, forgot when he spanked you again and I traced those lips,

Not the ones we’d all imagine.

[Please honey, let us do it again because we like you (I know I do)]

 

My notebook becomes a coaster in the back room. It’s very small and narrow and the electrical outlets don’t work and the one chair in there right in the corner is broken. So it’s like an old office chair that leans all the way back it’s either empty or full of a bunch of them getting ready and they’re getting ready in the best way they know how. It’s adjacent to the dance rooms, there’s two of them, private dance rooms

You can hear everything the guy is saying and the stripper is saying and it’s a private dance room. They can hear the slapping, the smacking, Don’t do this’, Do it more, hands on and if you don’t have your wits about you, shit goes south fast.

 

 

Chapter Two: The Sky

She starts off by telling me how thin the plywood is in the back room. She’s probably never said anything so politely before.

“Honey, you better watch out about what you say in those rooms because you don’t know who’s listening back here.  You gotta be careful, you know?” She tells me this because she’s got the scoop on me now and she can relate to me.  I’ve done bad stuff, she and I both share and keep secrets.

“Look at me, no I know it’s hard,” and then she mutters offhandedly, “something has happened before, but like, here’s the deal…” In the back room the lights on the vanity are mostly missing, we’ve got two or three bulbs maybe, and the rest are just empty sockets.  The flashing lights from the stage illuminate most of the room; she and I look through the fiber optic field at each other.  And she grabs my chin, starting, “No, you look at me and you listen.  I’ve been in the industry for 25 years I hate this part because it’s poorly written. Sorry.

After Life-The Film

May 4, 2015 /

Though it was last week when we watched that film, I still see that man’s eyes staring into the faces of those who’ve been forgotten.  Not just that young girl’s face, who hadn’t lived long enough to know which memory to choose, but the faces of the rest of the council too, like somehow that guy had seen when the old man cheated at checkers using, ‘the oldest trick in the book’ or saw how the outside of the memory bank looked like the park that has been the source of bittersweet recollection for so many people.  I wonder if somehow it is the same park they all remember, and if it’s winter there because the workers are all ghosts, and ghosts seem to make places cold.  So maybe when the old man goes to the park to be with his wife, and she has gone there to be with that young soldier, and the soldier goes to the idea of the park with his death-made friends, if they’re all seasons of the same park, seasons of time as it passes for that space, and not just the people.

Maybe places can’t remember because they’re inanimate, but as Modiano expressed in his book, and what this film seems to say to me, is that places are impressed on by people and by their sense of time and memory.

Maybe the guy in charge of the moon in that place is the man on the moon…That’s just silly romanticizing, but it is pretty to imagine.  This reminds me of a fantasy trilogy at the end of which these two kids fell in love, but couldn’t exist in the same world.  They lived the rest of their lives in parallel universes but once a year visited the same park at the same time on the same bench (or maybe it was under a tree).  How do they remember each other? Do they imagine the other as they’d age? I wonder if that soldier guy gets to sit and think forever now and if that’s good or bad.  No birds, no wind, no music, just the silent staring and remembering….

On the Culture of Space and Time

May 4, 2015 /

Some things I was thinking about while reading Culture of Space and Time:

In this book it talks about time. And space. And how it shaped modern culture.  I have in my notes on this assignment, like 12 questions;  How is time reversible? How do we ever experience universal time? How can I or anyone really know when our time is ours or everyone’s or? What is time then? What is time’s number, texture, and direction? What about music?

…And then the list gets super weird.  My thoughts on this text are pretty standard.  I am wondering about public time versus private time mostly.  I liked the statement, “Divisions of time ‘brutally interrupt the matter that they frame’” (32), especially in relation to personal time and the impact on the creation of art, or things which people can associate with their culture that take “time” to do, prayer, art, philosophy, science, and other rituals…

It’s interesting to think of the division of time as an invitation to a new kind of space.  We’re not all in our own worlds experiencing life with whatever increments our mind’s use, the universality of the measurement of time, the standardization of the minute, hour, second… It make many wonderful things possible, measuring the age of the Earth, making advancements in science not only in that respect but also in how people understand the mind (Yeah, I’m talking Freud now).  The importance of memories was augmented by the advent of a new, public, social anxiety, and cultures across the world shifted their focus from their arbitrary worlds and instead, focused on existence at a global scale.

I was thinking about how this relates to Proust.  He wrote a book symbolizing how experiences, impressions, compounded and ever compounding, cease to exist once they are named or attempted to be objectively/Truthfully remembered.  We are no longer who we were one second ago even, so our rememberances, are never the same as when we were in the past and living them because we are never the same after any experience, after any measurement of time and input of stimuli.

An idea I attribute to Proust’s work so far is that recollection and remembering can and do place us out of time involuntarily, and only then can we experience a True past.

That notions is shown in this other book through the development of memory therapy with the mentally ill, it’s shown in art with the abstract paintings of clocks with no hands, in new experiences with cinematography and what shows that time-is-happening or this-happened-long-ago.  I think in this way we can all relate to what Proust is trying to comment on in relation to the time part of living.

Close Reading

May 4, 2015 /

Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

04 May 2015

On Madame de Villeparisis and Aristocratic Women (244-249)

Mme de Villeparisis in this selection serves as a stark comparison to Guermantes, who holds and maintains a higher position in the French aristocracy but lives in constant anxiety over the conducting herself properly within her position.  Women it seems, if they address their individuality publicly, are much more likely to be caste-down (I’m imagining the scene earlier in the book where Mme Guermantes is acting like a silly servant girl inside her house, but wouldn’t deign to exhibit that character anywhere in the eyes of society, however, as the narrator exhibits, she is always under watch by someone else, like everyone, even if it’s a boy looking outside his window).

De Villeparisis is characterized by the narrator’s postulations on how she came to meet her defamation.  What secret scandals, now hidden from the children of her once-peers (even the word peer would suggest observation and not so much camaraderie) was she involved in?  What mal-temperament, misconduct, social no-no did she commit to lose her place in society?  Marcel talks about her sharp-tongue, which, though her conduct now does not exemplify, may have been a cause.  In writing her memoir she may have taken on those airs of kindness and charm which she was not bestowed with in her natural character, that women were more well-received by adhering to a strict form, something rather than someone, which lent itself to the foundation of those fancy people’s existence.

I found this passage to be, probably appropriately for its time, markedly sexist.  Of de Villeparisis’ character the narrator writes:

Instead of the character which it possessed [referring to the character of de Villeparisis’ generation of aristocratic women], one finds a sensibility, an intelligence which are not conducive to action…(245) it was this intelligence, resembling rather that of a writer of the second rank than that of a woman of position…that was undoubtedly the cause of her social decline. (246)

This, among several other statements in the passage (there is one about her lacking the ability to comprehend the genius of certain artists, the discourse later when Marcel equates de Villeparisis’ memoir to work of frivolity because it is not academic; he calls her a bluestocking woman which implies this attempt at an equality with men’s conduct within her role as an aristocratic woman)serves to emphasize that a fancy lady’s role in that world is to do what is proper, with little merit for their actual personality if it shies away from what is typical or trivial too much.

Moreover, this passage is a depiction of the importance and delicacy of social functions in the aristocracy, as when the narrator hypothesizes that it may be (or in addition to her taunting less educated guests) that because she disregards the class distinction and favors individuality more (inviting the handsome man, or the funny guy, or the way too-cool one), eschewing the tenet of exclusivity as a measure of success, that is her downfall.  This is critical because it makes me wonder more about Odette and Madame Verduran’s success at navigating this social construct.  What fortitude and reservations did they develop and overcome to be the stock people they are?  And Guermantes, she who’s secretly afraid of being this marvelous title, how does she compare?  One thing I know I got out of reading this passage is that de Villeparisis, for all her individuality, was unsuccessful in society because she wanted to be a person and not a host (and I mean that in a parasitic weird sort of way).

 

Week Three: Postmemory in Dora Bruder Workshop

April 21, 2015 /

Modiano went to great lengths to distinguish the types of evidence he used to create Dora Bruder.  At certain points his statements appear to me to be factual, but he does offer his own theories when data is sparse and uses sound deductive reasoning to develop his perspective.  An exceptionally apt example of this dichotomy is found in the chapter on Dora Bruder’s escape from boarding school.  In this section Modiano blends facts such as Bruder’s father failing to register her as a, “Jewess” and with conjecture, “I doubt if Dora’s father would have had either the time or the inclination…” (46).   He expounds on Dora’s life using a lot of logical reasoning, but I think it’s apparent when his words are citing facts and when they are from his own beliefs or thoughts.  When so little information is available it becomes essential to fill in the gaps with one’s own imaginings using the collected data (however meager) as a foundation off of which to extrapolate. For example, the author describes imagined, though no less plausible, scenarios that depict what may have transpired at Dora’s disappearance.  Dora probably left Sunday evening, though he can’t be sure, the Mother Superior either called, maybe it was on the next day, that evening, or maybe, since there isn’t a telephone number listed for the school (at least it didn’t surface during the author’s research), she sent a sister to the Bruder’s place.  Or still yet, what if the weather was warm and mild and Dora left during the day? Modiano says that knowing trivial or tangential facts would help to explain the story (on page 48) and I believe it’s because there are so many minor details we take for granted in history, in life, details which shape an individual’s thoughts and actions, simply knowing if it was sunny out would introduce a storm of new postulations.  Modiano’s imagination lends itself well to the call and response style that bridges the gaps between what can be known and what is lost.  The poised vignettes he creates, such as the scene where Dora escapes in the sunshine of the day, or conversely, when she leaves into the frosty unforgiving night, give stability to the story and make the narrator, Dora, and, to a lesser degree, Modiano’s father, more real.  Employing this array of tools– introspection, imagination, and research created a narrative from shadows and ashes.  Dora Bruder lived and escaped the passage of time through anonymity.  Without supposition and the author’s reflections what we’d know about Dora would be empty, plain, unreal.  She was Jewish, her father Austrian, he was a disabled veteran, her mother was a seamstress, etc.  All the facts add up to a few lines on a page.  And that’s not what makes a person.

Throughout the novel the narrator recalls his backstory in conjunction with Dora’s.  He asserts at the beginning of the story that while time progresses, “…perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into another.  That of 1965 and 1942.” (6).  I think he uses the anachronistic telling of parts of his life to signify the process he went through to discover Dora Bruder’s life.  Modiano’s reflections are structured around his relationship with his father, an Italian Jew who lived in Paris during WWII, right around the corner from the Bruder’s basically.  The significance of the narrator’s relationship with his father is that it aids in explaining and contrasting the past experiences of a stranger who, in so many words, barely seemed to exist (Dora), with strangers and memories of a different nature: Modiano’s unfamiliarity with his father and the stranger who is the narrator to the reader.  His father clearly made an impression on how he lives his life; from getting arrested because of that father, from the paternal negligence, and the tight-lipped demeanor of such a parent.  Modiano even emulates his father’s past in some involuntary ways as is the case when Modiano sells stolen goods to a pawn shop guy who knew his father from the black market during the war.  He goes on to relate the anxiety and panic he felt when he tried and failed to visit his father in the hospital before he died to a similar fear when the narrator is trying to access Dora Bruder’s birth records.  I think these motifs of absence and strife translate across the narrator’s perspective on his life and are filters through which he accesses Dora’s experiences.

The final chapter of the book is what makes Dora Bruder real.  The narrator explains how when he applies a phrase to Dora’s ghost in his mind, he finds her not only real, but like a person he knows.  When he discusses her (more than likely) final year, he is giving facts about what her life had certainly become.  He’s also reinstating her humanity by asking questions she herself probably asked, “Will Mother visit before we’re sent away?” He does it again when he reminds readers that Dora had places she visited, had a way in which she spent her time, had secrets that she took with her to her grave, these statements are reinforcements to elements that make people, people.  Beyond all of that, Dora Bruder had memories and those inextricably make an individual real.

Dilatory Journal Entry

April 18, 2015 /

These entries are anachronistic now.

18 April 2015

I was going over some old notes on memory because I knew I needed to augment my turning point paper and I needed some ideas for additional content. I found some poorly written thing but it was too poignant to ignore and not think about and I think maybe this would be a good journal entry… Fuck. I don’t like editing and explaining myself. That’s why my paper was crap in the first place.  My ‘turning point’ isn’t a narrative on a major experience like prescribed, but rather a reflection on what brings reflection and what it feels like to travel through time in that way (for lack of a better term).   Probably, this entry along with the notes I discovered, would fit into that narrative assignment, but I don’t know. Last night I really wanted to write, to sing, to drink some wine and figure some stuff out.  I watched EastBound and Under episodes instead and revisited a certain part of limbo when I fell asleep…

Preoccupied with these unfulfilled desires, these cravings to create something even if it was as bad and shameful as everything else I’ve tried to do, then thinking of the pitying way I looked at my own soft-boiled soul, as if my soul and self were separate; the thinking me with this look in her eyes as if telling that soul with only a glance, that it would understand someday the purpose of its service. I wondered in polite disgust if I had been the one to put it in the pot in the first place…  What things do we give up for the comfort and accessibility of peace?  I didn’t want to protest, to explain myself, I just wanted to be this other part of who I am.  A silk sheet which weighs and wears like lead.  That’s what whatever this weak-willed submission to normalcy is.

Last night to fall asleep I took a few extra of my anxiety pills, not to kill myself or to mitigate some inalienable sorrow, simply because if I take two instead of one, I fall asleep more easily.  When the moony waters of it came to me at high tide it was in slow, abrasive waves, cold and raking; granules of dream-salts rhythmically embedded themselves in, allowing to be washed higher, closer, deeper… tracing and erasing crop signs on the calm of my sand-shoal-being until I was frosty and drunk from the osmosis of moonlight-in-maritime dreamscape.   And then my dreams came as shards of sullen ice, resentful that none could persuade my waterlogged (klonopin-drowned) thoughts to keep to their current, for my body was under this sheet of ice, the water in which I was immersed looked mineral-y, strangled…sometimes sapphiric, or fluorentine, or dusty. And these pubescent icicles of ideas never came close to navigating the throttled, rudderless, float of my sleep, but rather, left small breathing holes through the shelf between the air and me, so that, when I passed on from one idea to the next, my body would instinctively gasp for an urgent breath with my eyes snapping open in that painful way blinking happens on the early mornings in January in Mount Washington Valley.  I would see this veneer of a scene, a vignette of a thought as though it were being projected as a frame from a film of possibilities which exist in some way, or in all ways, in my head even if they could never occur.  I’d found some love letter, or I saw myself saying something in a place where I’d been absent, or I listened to my thought-self and saw her as a separate trapped me, that type of thing.

I went to look through my old notes on memories, on dreams, and I found an entry from exactly one year ago last night about this same type of experience.  And I wonder if I’ve stopped floating toward anything and instead I’m just drifting under this ice and maybe one day there won’t be anymore moody dream pieces to pierce my memory and let my soul breathe.

A Memory

April 5, 2015 /

4 April 2015

Stephanie Zavas

In Search of Lost Time

A Memory

I can’t remember when the flowers appeared in the heating vents of my old Volkeswagen, but I left them there. Wherever they came from, they came at a time when the sun still warmed the earth and the breeze blew soft and satiny. This mind of mine, a time capsule, a storage unit frozen with age, recollects, at the most unpredictable of times, memories that are not just images of previous encounters with songs, roads, love, struggles… They barrel through my eyes, through all of my senses in an overwhelming vacuum-bag of life-times. I see and feel days in an instant, yesterday and coinciding with years past, a past and present imperative plagues the future with a sandy fog– the Dust Bowl of my dreams. In these moments I despair, rejoice, panic, hate, and fall in love. Time warps and fades, and I expand and contract across dimensions, I become dimensionless.

What form do memories take? Is there a universe where they repose, waiting, existing, remembering a time when they had yet to transcend this world in me. If it is so then my memories refuse enlightenment. They seek refuge in the moments when I see a familiar place, a long forgotten snowflower, trapped in the heating vent of my car.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, from just being poor and all kinds of other issues, to foster care, to some other sad stuff that is, you know, just the way life goes. But in this situation, I had moved back to an old foster home, having dropped out of college and moved away to Los Angeles which wasn’t healthy for a multiplicity of reasons. When I noticed those flowers, preserved and lingering, for how long and for how many cross-country trips I’ve taken trying to find my home, I discovered a fascination with memory, and and how one reconciles memory and time . It was a pleasurable thing, so innocent and beautiful, these flowers which endured through death, dread, enchantment, mountain passes, grassy plains, deserts and country roads, circumnavigating the country with me through every kind of weather and season.  

A Journal Entry for Week One.

April 5, 2015 /

1 April, 2015

Oh, calm my racing heart just to beat in time with the seconds’ hand on the clock. And I will think and make beautiful ideas and thoughts and sex and love.

It was such a momentary relief. More like a pause in my existence than an actual change in me. I still feel

why I am not In my mind I will cradle my head as I cry and rock myself, my-self to ease. Then my outside and inside will go do lovely things and be good and well. But I hurt.

Maybe I should tell him. It may be appropriate to let someone like that

It’d be worse for both of us to see. How I occupy my time so I keep some false distance. I am never busy, and I run from you so you won’t run from me

because I am scared of everything and maybe I can never safely love anyone they may hurt me and I am skittish like a beaten dog but sometimes I’m okay and then other days I’m so sorry and I wish I hadn’t met you I could spare you and I the trauma of seeing me turn light and dark and fade and blind I could love and I would die before I ever did again because I am so frightened and I will hurt you or never let you love me never please do but do always and I wish I never kissed you I remember them all and I am so much that beaten dog will only drag you and everyone else I love down if I am too close

heavy

so to not too close but I just want to be the loveliest feeling I’ve ever had, love you because you deserve the world I have it whole thing buried in my soul you can have it, anyway. And I, loving

friends but I am not always good other women and with love for you so maybe you don’t need this from me I am sorry.

Too soon, my heart beats too fast and falls too quickly and now, ruined, I love and die.

© 2024 In Search of Lost Time
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, Washington

Log in — Up ↑