For the majority of my life I’ve had the very vivid but very ridiculous memory of Elmo and Kermit the Frog walking slowly down a foggy street on their way to a murder spree. I can still see the dented trash cans they passed and the dying brown grass they walked over. Obviously, I never believed this was an actual event. I always thought it was from some comedic horror-parody movie. People love seeing their nostalgia perverted.

There was no movie. For so many years I was so confused why no one else could remember it, or why I could never remember the movie’s title, but I never once considered there wasn’t really a morbid muppets movie. The memory of that scene was so vivid in my mind. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I began to realize that I might have been wrong all that time. Now, I assume it must have been part of some nightmare I had as a child falling asleep while watching PBS.

A lot of my earlier memories are just surreal fragmented scenes and impressions.  Floating through pale blue hallway and a woman with extremely red lips murmuring under her breath. A swing set in a backyard that is perfectly grey. A man who lives in the woods behind my neighborhood and sings to bees. Someone standing in my room in the early morning who is facing me, but not looking at me.

I don’t know if any of these are real, or if they were dreams, or if I just made them up entirely at some point. I’m not sure if it matters where they came from. However these thoughts got to me, they’re still always going to be a part of me in some way.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #2
April 12^th, 2015

In Slavoj Zizek’s, Looking Awry, he claims, “The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze.” (1) When looking at Swann’s love for Odette, we can see a similar desire arising which mimics this definition. In what was initially thought of as disgust, Swann has replaced with an artistic masterpiece which he transposed those early feelings into. In creating a want for Odette which was initially nowhere to be found, Swann has formulated this desire through a distorted view, one which eventually grows into a jealous, self-absorbed desire to conquest the Odette of his fantasies. In creating this desire, Swann comes to pass over glaringly obvious signs of which she does not share mutual affections. These desire glasses which Swann wears resembles one of the harsher facets of desire of which we’re all privy to. In lesser strengths, we’re subjected to desires of which we create realities that do not fit into an objective world or object. An easier way to think of this is that we become blind with passion and forget the things along the way in our quests for the end, golden goal. If we think about Swann’s formulation of this desire, I’m sure we can see similar aspects of behavior that resemble our own lives. We see something that makes us angry, cynical, or blasé about, but may find ourselves wrapped up with those feelings, and even sometimes wanting to reconstruct that object so as to fit harmoniously into our world. It is not necessarily a bad thing to desire, for desire is a good motivational tool and inspirational push. What we should be wary of, is entrenching ourselves into that obsessive, controlling behavior of which Swann takes on in his falsified love of Odette, in which he hasn’t fallen in love with the person, but with the desires he’s created.

Bibliography

1.)    Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.

4/2
The last time I kept a continuous journal was just about a year ago, when I was living in Tukwila. At night I’d huddle under my quilt on a mattress on the floor, since a bolt in my bedframe had shorn through in the middle of the night, and the creaky metal skeleton lay uselessly a few feet away. I wrote by the light of a dawn simulator and for a few weeks I filled a spiral notebook with longing, deliberation, verses, drawings, averaging a page a day. Writing was difficult. I forced myself to persist, even when all I could write about was how horrible I was at writing, and I found that, after my self doubt passed, the words came easily. I’ve heard it told that the worst thing you can do while writing is take your pen off the paper, and it’s that focusing on process is more fulfilling than focusing on results, and better for overall development. I was learning something, and not just journalling: I was attacking the guitar ferociously, teaching myself to play by finding patterns just out of my ability to play and practicing them relentlessly. My guitar and my journal were my tools of release, separate but not exclusive; as I wrote riffs without melody and verses without song a pattern I’d been strumming found its way into my journal, or a scrap of writing from attempted poems came to be set to music in my head. All and all it was an experience of growth. I’m not sure why my journalling tapered off–probably malaise settling in and the habit rotting out–but I believe writing on a regular basis again will be good for me, good to have a place to air out thoughts and the record to analyze.
4/4
Beth’s out of town. Camping with family. I think it’s good for us to have a chance to be apart, but I do miss her. It’s kind of amazing having a best friend who is always ready to go do stuff with you. Surely she’s off on the peninsula, sunning by the sea and recording her own thoughts similarly. Maybe not.
Things have been better for us. We’re having fun together again. I’m not so crossed up inside, although I can feel depression clinging gently to my actions, like gravity, slowing me as I progress through the day, but it’s not more than I can manage. I’ve gotten stuff done today. I dipped my nose into Proust for a good second. It was refreshing to read in the woods, by sunlight, and the beautiful scenery that Proust describes which characterizes Swann’s way and the Guermantes way was easily summoned up by my mind, using the surrounding natural beauty not as a distraction from but a platform for imagination. I wrote in this journal, which I had been putting off and sort of dreading, but for no good reason, as it’s pretty compelling work. I can imagine struggling to find something–even just one sentence–to write without hiding my face with shame, which might be way I was hesitant to begin. Imagining possible failure can be more terrifying than actually encountering it. I guess I should remember that I can do most things I put my mind to, and here I’m putting my mind towards re-developing the habit of writing.
4/5
It’s Easter. The weather is appropriately temperate the sun shines with intensity through my window. I can feel it on my skin. I think I could appreciate the sun more if I hadn’t made the executive decision to get drunk last night–I’m talking pretty drunk. It was really excellent, really, throwing back a bottle of pissy malt liquor (and getting appropriately pissed) on the beach with my friends, playing guitar songs to the sea and playing 3-on-3 chess under the dim LED glow of a headlamp, but I woke up feeling like my head was covered in gauze and gently spinning. Oh well. Hangovers mean lazy mornings, necessarily, and coffee and cigarettes on the back porch, and greasy breakfast. Today I’ll have the coffee only, but memories of mornings after nights of debauchery flit through my head–Kendra tearing through a pack of Kings, squinting under massive sunglasses–
4/6
Week two. Monday. Early mornings. Beth is back. She had a hard time getting out of bed. She told me she feels disconnected from her body and her family–camping turnt with bigoted strangers’ll do that. I wish I could have been a refuge, a person to vent to while she was experiencing her frustrations, but I don’t mind pulling together now and helping her though these subsequent rough mornings. Today my heart feels light, buoyant enough to carry two souls out of bed sheets and into the sun. I’ve got my work done, I’m prepared to tackle this week–I’m ready
4/8
Today I feel limited, like my vision, instead of shooting out in cones in front of my eyes, stops just in front of my face, like my head is submerged in thick mist, and even though I can see, my perception and processing of my senses is blunted. Today I feel pain gently piercing my heart like a hot blade slipped between my ribs. If I could I’d phase out of my skin and my clothes and sink through the floor and foundation and let my spirit soak up the cool soil not-so-far beneath my feet. Participation in class seems impermissible. I feel isolated and inaccessible–alienated but not like a Parisian, like an alien in an ill-equipped human-suit, barely passing, barely breathing, succumbing to toxic atmosphere.
4/9
Non, de rien. It’s nothing. You’re nothing. Just a slack-jawed lowbrow Neanderthal clutching a church-pew pencil, biting down to keep from biting off your own tongue, metallic taste spreading across your taste buds and subsequently across your cortices. Self-abuse is your sustenance. Self-destruction is your muse, and you rape her every night. Your Calliope descends on you like foggy mists, and all I can do is stumble through sentences like a drunken fool into the night, to the whon the pooling fog conceals infinite possibilities.
“Speaking about queer hair studio, how about a mullet?”
Proust get out of my head!
Engineered to get fucked up. Mothra is in the your room! Mothman was on campus. I heard his half-moth-half-man cackle echo on campus. I heard his wicked laughter, on the path to the dorms, and in
4/11
Look where you cut me!
Look at where the hot coals melted your flesh into a twisted caldera. I wonder what you saw in those glowing embers, Zodiac, and what synaptic snap compelled your drunken feat–your drunken feet, too numb to feel skin burning? Your numb heart, too drunk on self-destruction to care? I hope you heel where you need to.

I read Joseph Mitchell’s story on Lady Olga and fell in love with his way of character descriptions. I then read his unfinished third chapter of what was going to be his memoir. He directly analyzes memory in this part:

“In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.”

I’ve only lived nineteen years, and I don’t have moments that I want to move back to just yet. Yet, while working on my life history project of my dad, I find that he wants more than anything to live in the past. He struggles day to day with his disease, since he found out about it four years ago. Our lives changed when my dad got sick. He was the breadwinner of the family, the rock that tied us all together. He then needed us to be his rock. It was the most hard on him, he felt like a burden, or a small child that had to be constantly taken care of. He went through a succession of doctors, constantly telling him bad news. We lost our home to foreclosure during my senior year of high school and he had to shut down his business. Those years became so unpleasant, it didn’t seem like our family could catch a break.

Just one month ago my dad was approved for an experimental cure that was just released for his disease. Suddenly doctors were telling him he had a chance and it ignited the determined character my dad had thought he lost inside himself. The next few months he has left on the treatment are going to be just as hard as his fight before but this cure will give him the ability to look towards the future and what amazing moments he has to look forward to.

Before the class watched the film, I googled the documentary we were going to watch and I honestly did not think it was going to be good. When it began the first 20 minutes somewhat bored me, but once it started to get into the romance with the mother and the father I became very interested and kind of attached to this family. Later on when they reveal the mothers affair with harry who we later find out is Sarah’s biological father, I became very emotional, mainly towards Micheal. I absolutely loved how throughout the movie Micheal was narrating and reading his writing because it backed up what they said in the beginning how he was a great writer and he really is. When he said to not feel sorry for him and to feel sorry for harry because in the end the mother did end up with him and he also had the privilege to raise Sarah. That was the best line in the entire film for me. Although Sarah and her father and whoever else was involved with this documentary probably made a lot of money from it, I still give them a lot of credit for revealing this personal story to the world. It was very touching.

These two articles make me grateful for my mom. Her whole life, even before she met my dad and had us kids she was always recording her life and her families lives through film. Her obsession has only progressed with the progression of electronics. She hasn’t missed a photo opp. at a family get together, birthdays, weddings, If you can think it she’s recording or taking pictures of it. I remember one time asking her why she takes so many pictures and she could only smile and tell me I’ll appreciate them one day when I’m a grandmother and want to see my mothers face and remember those precious moments when my babies aren’t so precious anymore. I laughed and didn’t think about it, but now she creates projects for herself. She goes through old pictures of my grandparents, scanning them and saving them to a drive. This habit comes in handy especially since my grandparents passed away. We’ve used her photos at their memorials and many have complimented on the photos. I would be able to lay out family photos from where it all started to now. I’m sure the nostalgia of time will bring tears of all types of emotions.

Music & Memory:

The other day in seminar we were talking about music and memory. Specifically Swann’s “true feelings” towards Odette and if he only loves her because the memory of Vinteuil’s sonata is associated with her. This conversation struck a quick thought about pregnancy and music. I remember being in my first trimester with my son, and being told to play classical music close to my belly for him to hear because it will stimulate his brain and he’ll be “smarter”. Another time in Seminar, I think it was Kekoa that mentioned that liking classical music is something that you have to learn to enjoy. Well from experience, I have always loved music. My parents exposed me to all types of music from womb, to birth and so on. I am doing the same thing for Roman. I think because I played music for him since before he was born and play it when he goes to sleep, in the  car etc.  is why he relates to it so well. He will hear the bass, or the repetitive lyrics and begin singing and dancing. I don’t think he necessarily  knows what the song is saying, but its something he remembers from when he’s asleep.

Just a thought-

From class the other day, the concept of everyone wearing glass’ that all view the world differently stood out to me the most. Especially when  Stacy gave us an example of  this concept through the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz. This just reminded me of what the media is currently trying to portray what “beauty” is particularly towards young women. This message is through a lot of popular pop songs such as Meagan Trainor’s “All about that bass” where she sings about loving yourself because no matter what size you are, you’re perfect. There has always been artists who support this notion and are recognized for being the voice for women. But its more popular to portray your feelings about being different for this current generation of young adults.

At the beginning of my reading of Swann’s Way, when I first started to hear of M. Swann, I was intrigued. He was mysterious and unorthodox, straying away from high society with such care that almost nobody knew that he was living multiple lives. In actuality, this type of person and this type of lifestyle is not all that uncommon (at least in my experience) but it was the way that we heard about M. Swann through the eyes and ears of the narrator that made him more interesting to me that other people that I have read about and met in the two decades of my existence. It was wonderful hearing about him through the inaccurate conversation held by the narrators family and by the narrators own recollections and assumptions but when the novel transitioned into Swann In Love and we began to see more detail about M. Swann’s life I have to admit that I was disappointed. Not in the novel, but in M. Swann himself.

M. Swann doesn’t appear to be honest with himself in really any aspect. Maybe this is because it’s not really told through his point of view or maybe that is just how people acted in Parisian society of that time but M. Swann does not appear to be this unconventional man that we had been told he was. Instead, M. Swann appears to be no better than his high class associates and possibly even worse. I say this because while the high class of Paris that we are told about in the novel appear to be rather manipulative and impersonal at least they are being this way to each other and are aware of the intricate details of high class social politics. M. Swann, on the other hand, is acting this way towards everybody that he finds interest in, most of whom are of a lower class than his own. It seems poor of his character to interact with people this way because, as it appears to me, M. Swann is not separating himself from high society because he actually enjoys the company of middle and low class citizens but because he can get more of what he wants from them and with far less accountability.

The struggle continues…

I still haven’t gotten my set of In Search of Lost Time, so I am attempting to keep up while using a book that has a completely different translation than everyone else.  This makes it nearly impossible to find the page and passage that people are talking about or reading from at any given moment in class.  I am enjoying learning new things about literature and hearing all of the different points-of-view of the kids in the class though