My yard needs to be mowed. It is tedious little things like that that perturb me. I need to mow my god damn yard and I don’t have the time but I most certainly have the allergies that yell at me, “no, you do not want to mow the god damn yard!” Stupid yard. Stupid allergies. In Fall, I took a class called Silence, Solitude, and Laziness –the pillars of the good life. I spend a lot of time still thinking about what equates a good life. Is it mowing the yard? Is it finishing assignments on time? Is it doing well at my job? Is it traveling? I keep wondering when the big reveal will happen, the tada moment, when someone jumps out and tells me — hey, this is how you live a good life. I know this is no going to happen but I still like to look for it.

Sometimes I feel like I get glimpses of it when I hang out with little kids. Kids that just love you for no particularly good reason. They don’t care if you think your smart or stupid, skinny or fat, and they most certainly do not care about that pesky zit that showed up on your neck (although they will be more than happy to point it out to you). I have a little 4 year old buddy named Townes, whom comes over to my house on occasion. The first time he came over, I told him that I had a tub of toys, referring to a large plastic tub I keep stowed in my garage for such a time when children overtake my house. After pulling my car into the garage, Townes rushed into my house, and promptly found the bathroom. He then pulled back the shower curtain and gave me a look of absolute disdain, “there are not any toys in this tub,” he yelled, annoyed that I had seemed to have lied to him. I laughed and showed him the correct tub. Kids are so damn literal.

If Townes was a few years older I would pay him to mow my yard.

I wonder if Townes will have any recollection of such an interaction. To him it was no big deal, to me it was hilarious, and worth mentioning to multiple friends. It is always interesting to see what one deems important, what one chooses to recollect with great detail. I remember the look on his face, the grass-stained jeans he was wearing, and his lopsided bangs (it is a well proven fact that all children, at one point or another, will get their hands on scissors, and give themselves a lovely new hair-do). I remember the smudge of tomato sauce on his upper lip due to the pizza we had eaten at Old School. I imagine that this will fade, this memory, because that is what they do. Shuffled away in some place deep down.

Maybe this whole thought was brought about because of my need to mow my yard and his grass-stained jeans.

I really just need to mow my yard.

I believe it to be right for me to apologize for the lateness attached to this post — life has carried on at an erratic pace, spreading my attention thin within its wake. You see, my focus never is entirely consistent, for my thoughts are too often swayed by other matters of life, love, pain and happiness. All of these emotions flow in and out of me, and it is in fact tiring. I frequently look forward to the weekends as a break from the chaos, anticipating the time of leisure, only for it to slip by in the blink of an eye. Come Monday morning, my eyes are as baggy as ever, and I have fulfilled a false sense of restoration, and acquired a false sense of preparedness for the next week to come. However, these past weeks have changed that. In a way, all this time had made me undergo a transformation. My eyes are still baggy, yet I can’t help but feel as if they are now open – aware and conscious of particular details in my life – most importantly that of what I own, and what I don’t. In this transformation I have discovered a loss; that of time. It has been fourteen days in this program; fourteen days in which I have been in search of lost time.

Week 1

This adventure had started at the turn of this scholarly quarter. I immediately fell in love with this program, which had showcased all its glory from the start. My first day was the Wednesday of that primary week. The day had opened up with what I deemed to be a very philosophical reading of Marcel Proust’s intro to “Swann’s Way”. We had discussed the themes presented in the first handful of pages, one of which stuck to me most – the idea, this theme, that distinguished my perspective over life, between the reality of the physical world, and the reality of a very internal world. “How profound,” I had thought, “how real”.

This idea of separation between two realities was so legitimate in my eyes, so sound in my mind, that it had placed a new-found filter on the way I perceived the world. It was a beautiful thought, however it was equally disheartening. I went home that evening and was greeted by my family. I looked into the eyes of each of the members of my household; my mother, father, brother, grandmother and lover all looked back at me with a similar fondness. To them, my greeting was a normal, almost habitual occurrence, yet these moments dug deep into my own conscious. Those loved ones, who’s eyes I looked into, might have seen in my return, in a way,  a sort of background noise – irrelevant to the thoughts and worries already occupying their mind. But I saw these moments as an embodiment of our love. I became sad. I had realized that their love for me was not so simple – It was a sense of care produced by a collection of memories, experiences, thoughts and ideas entirely distinct from my own, and from one another. I had longed for it to be simpler than that, questioning to myself, “why can it not just be love?”.

By the end of that week I had developed a sort of existential crisis. The end of the first week concluded with a viewing of “Boyhood”, a film following the lives of a family over the course of many years. The main character was very much within my generation, and had many experiences which I could relate to. To say the least, I was emotionally invested in the film, and overwhelmed by the process of watching our protagonist’s adolescent life flash by in a matter of hours. Afterwards, I had reflected on my own life, which also seemed to pass by in what felt like a similar amount of time, and I became frightened at what the reality of my situation was; scared by the amount of time I had actually lived out, up to this present point. It was not only until I remembered the end of the film that my hope and happiness was restored. The ending scenes portrayed our the protagonist, who’s childhood ended, now at college, awaiting the potential of his future. I felt calmed, and my sense of control over my life was restored. Perhaps it was because the end of this boy’s story was so closely related to the start of mine — at the age of eighteen and at the cusp of adulthood.

Week 2

Talk about a turnaround… The first week of this program had left me feeling uncertain for my future. But I believe I have discovered my own personal ailment, thanks to this second week of school. Monday’s lecture was focused around the studies of French history; its revolutions, periods of enlightenment, the rise of the thinker and the Impressionist movement [an artistic style that I am quite fond of]. This uncertainty of the future, which tortured me at points, was replaced by a hope inspired by its unknown potential (thanks to the studies of a much more sturdy past; one which produced historical conflicts, beautiful art movements, and intriguing social change). I found comfort in hearing the thoughts of past philosophers, who also seemed to question. Whether it was about our place in the world, or the purpose of individualism, I knew that I was not alone in my existential crisis.

Week two had also called for the submission of our own memory project proposal. I had loved the study of French history so much that I had decided to continue European studies, this time, under the scope of Nazi-Germany. I saw this project as my own opportunity to make history, through my own interpretation of it. The program had not only assigned me to this work – it had ultimately provided me with the motivation to complete it. I look forward to updating others on my findings.

Often I have wished to disappear. This strange attraction pulls me into my own mind and distances me from people around me. I have told myself that this is necessary in order to gain a greater perspective on people in general. It is a feeling I have associated with gravity, and I’m still not sure why. It feels as inescapable as gravity, like it existed before me and I am merely a means for it to express itself. It begins with a kind of sleepiness which I must submit to at least to the extent of closing my eyes. At this point I can still listen to the world around me, or to music, but my mind is free from the visual data which just ever ends and is constantly diverting my attention, against my will, to the sway of trees, the flight of birds and bugs, the shapes of bodies around me, the way they move and what I can learn from this about the shape of their truest form.

The truest form– which I can never know in anyone other than myself, and thus I am drawn deeper, searching for my own truest self so that I might imagine that others are something similar. I disassociate with my body, my brain, and recognize that my thoughts are a ‘truer’ form of myself than my body, which I have had only very limited control in shaping. And my thoughts, what are the origins of these? I do not believe that I began as a ‘tabula rasa’ I have certain needs which have been on my mind, in some form or another, from the very beginning, and a will to meet these needs, even if at first, and for a long time, I could not name them and had no idea how to meet them. This frustration made me scream and cry and thus I discovered my very first means of satisfaction. Before language held any meaning for me, before the sensory data had been cataloged to any degree to be dissected and analysed. Before I had ‘thought’.

My thoughts are a truer form of me, but not the truest. Thoughts and behaviors are like plants which must be planted as a seed and allowed time to grow, if they are nurtured, or whither if not. I have the power, and the power has me, to choose which thoughts are nurtured and which are not, I don’t know how I can make such a decision without basing my opinion on preconceived notions. When I started, anything that helped me get what I felt like I needed was ‘good’ and almost anything else was ‘bad’. I cannot help what thoughts are planted in my mind, I can never rip them out completely, I can only starve them until they are too weak to move me.

Where did my desire to disappear come from? I can not say. I’m sure it began as something unrecognizable to whatever it can be called today. And over time it was nourished without my being aware of it. It crept up on me and by the time I could see it for what it was, we were indivisible. Now any attempt made by me to starve this thing resembles a battle field, more than a garden, where I am the loser more often than not.

This entry has gone on long enough and I’m still not sure how to bring it to the point I originally set out to make, so I’ll end it here and build upon this later.

One of my favorite parts of reading Proust is he succeeds in putting words to seemingly unexplainable experiences or thoughts. I have always been fascinated by the virtue of self-control. We exercise it all the time; as our sense of what should be done is often different from what we feel like doing. After Swann has acknowledged that his obsession with Odette is unhealthy; he attempts to control, rationalize, and suppress his addiction to her.

I think a 12 step recovery program would be great for Swann. The first step is admitting that you are powerless to overcome your addiction. He goes back and forth between awareness and denial of his unfortunate situation. On page 436 he has decided to not deny his visits to see Odette because, “having proved to himself-or so at least he believed- that he was so easily capable of resisting it, he no longer saw any danger in postponing a plan of separation.” Basically, here he believes that he has the power to resist Odette.

On page 438 we see Swann trying to convince himself that Odette is not as alluring as he thinks she is. “It’s an odd thing, but I actually thought her ugly.” For a second he believes himself. But regardless of how she looks, his love for Odette runs so much deeper than appearance.

On page 448, Swann is obsessing over where Odette had gone… again. The narrator comes in to say that that if we hold information in our minds (in this case Swann knowing where Odette had gone) we can “dispose of them as we choose, and gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.” This is super interesting. The justifications that feed obsession are, at the core, illusions of power.

I was fascinated by Swann’s opinions about a woman’s appearance. “His desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste” (317). In the past, Swann had pursed women that did not resemble his favorite paintings. “Depth of character, or melancholy expression would freeze his senses, which were, however, instantly aroused at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy flesh” (271).

As Swann falls in love with Odette everything changes. He begins to obsess with the fact that Odette resembles a Botticelli painting of Jethro’s Daughter. This, “similarly enhanced her beauty, also, and made her more precious” (316).

I think more than anything Proust reveals yet another mystery of love. Whoever we fall in love with begins to embody our “ideal attractive”. Of course, this might not be true for everyone; it is true of my personal experience and seemingly Swann’s here.

Earlier in Combray, in the narrator’s dreams he imagines Mme de Guermantes to be physically stunning. When he sees her he is instantly disappointed and finds her repelling. Then he decides that she isn’t ugly, just different than he had imagined.  In the next couple pages he proceeds to reconstruct her beauty in his mind. “And at once I fell in love with her” (250). The narrator had succeeded in completely changing his previous idea.

I have constantly been trying to figure out the difference between the character of Swann and the Narrator. It seems that the narrator has an easier time adjusting his preconceived notions. Swann has a hard time recovering or adjusting.

Reading Dora Bruder was an experience. It seemed connected to everything—Proust, Benjamin, docupoetry/Green-Wood, my own future, my near future with regards to the Memory Project—in a really satisfying way, and simultaneously, I found it incredibly frustrating as far as authorial/editorial choices went, like when to show documents and when to paraphrase, when to speculate or imagine. The slipperiness of the reality, or of the relationship between real and imagined. I kept asking, is this really real? I haven’t looked it up yet to find out. My guess is it’s somewhere between real and fiction, kind of like Stories We Tell or The Things They Carried—accessing the truth (or “truth”) through a level of fictionality that works much better than just fact to tell the essential thing. But I don’t know—it could all be true. Either way, it’s a masterpiece of editing, of slow revelation. It drove me crazy. I wanted it laid out straight, or I wanted to be absorbed by it, as I was with Stories We Tell, and not notice the questions of reality/imagination/editing, let the story turn off my critical faculties. It was almost like an itch, these questions. And the pronouns, the person of the narrator—mostly first person telling a story in third, and then this occasional, unannounced, casual slip into second. Putting us into Dora’s shoes, mostly, but sometimes the narrator’s, or some unknown third party.

…

Well, I gave in and looked it up. Dora Bruder does not have a Wikipedia entry, but Patrick Modiano does. He really did write a book called La Place de L’étoile, so that’s factually true, at least. Dora Bruder is classed as a novel—a work of fiction. But The Things They Carried is classed as a memoir, despite having known, disticnt elements of untruth, of fiction. So I don’t know, still. The New Statesman ran a piece in 2014 called “Why nobody knows what to think about Patrick Modiano winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” that might have more answers, or at least further questions.  It calls Dora Bruder (or, apparently in some English editions, Search Warrant) “a documentary account.” Then why are there no citations of any kind, no Notes in the back? The NS piece also makes the connection to Proust, noting that all of Modiano’s works are connected/ongoing, like the volumes of In Search of Lost Time.

The Kirkus Review listed on Amazon describes the book as “Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of life that strides the two genres.” It’s funny that this ambiguity pisses me off so much, because this is close to the kind of work I adored last quarter—documentary poetry, specifically Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood—and to the kind of work I want to make, I think, in the future. I think what gets me is the opacity. What I loved about Green-Wood was its transparency, except as I write that I remember it’s not true. I remember feeling puzzled there, too: though there were notes and clearer citations, it wasn’t line by line or footnoted, it wasn’t always clear what was borrowed and what was original. Which I guess raises its own questions about the nature of ‘originality,’ but that’s a whole other story (or blog post). So then what is the difference, if not transparency/opacity? Or would I find myself peeved at the books I loved last quarter, if I reread now, in light of the questions of identity, narrator reliability/stability, memory/imagination/reality, that have been raised by and around the texts in this program? How do I reconcile these questions and frustrations with my own desire for genre-bending, documentary or research-based creative work? Where do I find my place in this conversation as a writer and as a reader/student/thinker? I don’t think answers to any of these questions are ready to come out of me yet. I think I need to stew in them for a while. But I had to isolate the questions to start stewing, so…here we go, I guess.

Yesterday she celebrated her one month of sobriety and today she celebrates her birthday.  My friend has always thrived in a world separate from mine that I couldn’t understand.  She was a person who shirked responsibility and pursued moments that would bring temporary satisfaction.  It always seemed like she was hurting herself, whether that was her struggle with anorexia or her battle with drug addiction.  I sat face to face with the young woman who had been absent from my life for a whole year.

She speaks in a British-American hybrid accent.  The porch light accentuates her cheekbones and her smile excites me.  Her story began with giving up her drug addiction, finally saying she had had enough.  She gave up pursuing the high to better her life and become sober.  My friend has always been an enigma to me, even though i consider us close.  There’s this apprehension that sets in whenever I see her, this time my apprehension was gone rather quickly.  This was the most transparent and honest form of her that I had ever seen.  She was finally alive, and I felt relieved to see her genuinely smile and accept her shortcomings.

“Someones calling me,” she picked up her phone and put it on speaker.  Her friend from treatment had relapsed and needed someone to be there for her. “Lets do our gratefuls,” this was an exercise that my friend had done in treatment,  it was where you would name three things that you were grateful for.  As they both shared, I was shocked at how simple the things they were grateful for were.

Emily has transformed.

When watching the movie Stories We Tell I was struck by how the director Sarah Polley constructed a story using both real and counterfeit footage. She tricks the audience by stating that her father received an 8mm video camera. From then on, we are under the impression that all the footage is real. Although there was, from the start, questions in my mind about the authenticity of some of the shots I was viewing, I told myself even if it was faked it didn’t matter. I was more interested in staying caught up with the story unfolding in front of me. At the end of the movie she reveals to her audience that some of the footage is staged.  For me, it was an “ah ha!” moment that confirmed my suspicion.

The question is why did she do this? Is it because she is an actor? In her world, movies create an illusionary reality which can parallel actual experience? Does she blend the two because she is afraid the story itself will not capture the audience fully? I do not think so. I think, because there are moments like the funeral scene where the shot pans across the crowd, then focuses in on Harry staring at the camera from a distance. The moment is so constructed, it is impossible to not question the authenticity of the footage.  I think Sarah was not trying to trick her audience, I think she was combining real and faux footage to create the representation of how our memories work.

Memory can be false. It can warp over time like wood exposed to the elements. Time, for memories is a corrosive substance. Small details of a memory flake off as time goes by, and with longer periods the memory may lose its original shape. I can withdraw inside myself and open a chest inside my mind filled to the brink with memories from my childhood. I can pull them out like forgotten toys in an attic, and examine them.  Bits are so vivid, even after years and years of lifetime I can still smell, touch, taste, and hear certain aspects.  But none are whole.  I have used my imagination like glue, to keep them together; to fill in the cracks that threaten to widen and obliterate the memory.

And this is what I think Sarah Polley has done with the melding of real and fake footage. She has filled in the gaps. The staged footage is there as an adhesive to strengthen the story she is telling. The real footage can represent memory, faded and jagged. It has lost much of its substance, and viewing the footage just like remembering a memory can be difficult unless one fills in the blanks to solidify it. So Sarah used staged footage to congeal the story; to make it whole and fluid.  Just as I construct insignificant details within a memory to help make it real to me again.

The novel A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is my favorite piece of modern literature, as well as being a large part what inspired me to take this class and the reason behind the name of my blog.

The book opens:

Hi!

My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or will ever be.

Nao is the sweet, eccentric, and struggling teen whose journal pages are used as every other chapter of the book. She shares the role of narrator with Ruth, a middle aged author living on an island in the pacific northwest. When Ruth finds Nao’s journal, presumably many years after its been written, the two begin a kind of conversation across space and time as they each explore in their own lives buddhist and french philosophy, japanese culture, quantum physics, and what lies ahead.

The journal that Nao is writing in, that serves as a bridge between the two narrators, is a “hacked” copy of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This means that someone had removed all the pages from Proust’s old book, and replaced them with blank journal pages, pages to be filled with the memories of young girl in Akiba Electricity Town, Japan. Although Proust is not discussed much directly, the themes in his novel are certainly present in A Tale for the Time Being, and reading about him briefly there was what sparked my interest to study his work.

When asked how Proust influenced the novel, Ozeki said:

Both Nao and Ruth are preoccupied with the past. Nao pines for her younger days in Sunnyvale. Ruth longs for her life in Manhattan and is trying (and failing) to write a memoir. They are stuck in the dream worlds of memory.

Proust was preoccupied with the passage of time and the evocative powers of memory. He coined the term “involuntary memory” to refer to a particular quality of remembrance, in which memory of the past arises unexpectedly, often triggered by some sensual experience, and is itself experienced sensually.

These are the waters that writers and readers spend their days paddling around in. We rely on our involuntary memory both to write and to read, because our memories of our lived experiences are what bring life to the words on the page, or in Proust’s case, many thousands of pages.

I think its amazing the way that authors can be in conversation with one another centuries apart, just as the two characters in Ozeki’s novel are.  I am very much inspired by the work of both these great authors to write my own fiction and memoir pieces in which I bring my experiences to life, and with themes relatable enough to still be relevant in two hundred years.

The emerald gleam of the Northwest has always enchanted me, and many hours were spent during my childhood inventing fantastical worlds amongst the majestic evergreens that populated my back yard. As I was born just a little north of Seattle I was introduced to some of the cultural mainstays of Washington early on; the Pacific Science Center, Seattle Art museum, Pike Place Market, and the Woodland Park Zoo convinced me that this relatively young metropolis was the pinnacle of intellectual exploration. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm in rural Sedro-Woolley while my paternal grandparents had a house in Ocean shores, so I received the best of both worlds, spending half of my summers riding horses up to the creek and catching tadpoles, and the the other half making sand castles and collecting sea shells.

My appreciation for where I grew up was doubled after my first long distance trip out of the Northwest, during which I visited family in Arizona. The heat was unbearable! And there wasn’t a single healthy tree to provide protection from the vicious sun.(When’s the last time you read under the peaceful shade of a cactus?) The super market was limited in it’s choice of produce, and infact, the only local fruit I tasted while there was prickly pear(warning:gloves don’t work as well as tongs for picking these). Everything was brown, and the dust that sprang up into mini twisters never failed to fill my nose with sand. And worse yet, brace yourselves my fellow Washingtonians, there wasn’t a single coffee shop to be found.
Okay, okay, I know what you’re going to say, “You’re just biased Tasia, you can’t give Arizona a fair shake after only one visit!” And to that I say: “YEP! Darn tootin’ I’m biased!” Biased in favor of vegetation, of majestic snowy mountains, and lush magical green forests which rush up to meet the mighty Pacific Ocean. Really, it’s not just Washington that I love, it’s the entire Northwest region.

Every year my family takes a trip down the west coast, we drive straight through Oregon and into Northern California’s Redwood Forrest, and then we work our way up. Every other year we take a ferry to Victoria Canada. Every city, every state, is unique, they each have something special to add to the trip, but they also share a lot too. It’s not just their temperate rainforests, or their misty water ways and rocky beaches, it’s a culture, an attitude. Something you can’t quite put your finger on, the way you may recognize the relation between siblings but not quite be able to place how they look alike.

I am not in fact, alone in my romantic sentiments towards the Pacific Northwest, and never have been. The region in which I have been babbling on about like a schoolgirl with a bad crush, is known as Cascadia. Cascadia is in fact a bioregion, a term popularized in the 1970s by the writer Peter Berg, and ecologist Raymond Dasmann(forrestsforever.org). What qualifies as a bioregion is determined by what ecosystems, waterways, soil, flora, and fauna are shared throughout an area. For instance, the largest temperate rainforest in the world spreads itself over an area ranging all the way from the lower portion of Alaska to Northern California, just one of the reasons the area has been defined as a bioregion. This concept of defining a portion of land by its natural characteristics rather than through governmental partitioning has since inspired the bioregionalist movement. Those associated with the movement not only prize the definition of a region by it’s organic characteristics, but agree with my aforementioned musings, that there is something culturally unifying about the Northwest overall. The significance of these truths have lead those associated with the movement to “the belief that political boundaries should match ecological and cultural boundaries(cascadianow).” If you live in the Pacific Northwest you may have seen their insignia: a blue, white, and green striped flag with a douglas fir at it’s center. It’s commonly found on car bumpers paired with their rallying cry, “Free Cascadia!”

For me, these realizations inspire many questions, for instance, if a bioregion shares not only it’s watersheds and ecosystems(etc.) but a particular culture, is that culture inspired by the land itself? If so, do similar bioregions share similar cultures? And more specific to the Northwest, how many people living in the cascadian boundaries actually identify with the overarching themes by which we are defined? Do other bioregions have residents as passionate about freeing the land from the tyranny of arbitrary lines drawn on a map, or are we just a bunch of liberal tree hugging hipsters hopped up on too much Starbucks? Alas, it may be so, but there is a definite charm to this new title I have for a very significant portion of my identity, cascadian, and I certainly plan to delve further into this matter in the near future. But for now, you must excuse me, for I have a date with a tree and and a hot cup of espresso.