As I watched Boyhood I was reminded of many aspects of my own childhood. I was trying to figure out how close I was in age to the children in the film. Loudly singing “Baby One More Time” to drive my brother crazy? I remember doing that. It wasn’t until the gadgets started appearing that I realized I’m a bit older than them. I was in high school when the Motorola Razr came out. So I looked it up. I’m 5 years older than the actors that played Mason and Samantha. Still, a lot of their childhood parallels memories I have of growing up in the 90s and 2000s.

One of the first things that struck me was the relationship the siblings had as young children. Like when they were moving from Austin and the kids were kind of hitting each other in the back of the seat. “Make a barrier!” their mom kept saying. They hit each other, then glared, made a barrier and then almost immediately started giggling. It reminded me a lot of my brother and I as children. Like Samantha, I am just about two years older than my brother. When you’re a child that age difference seems vast and miniscule at the same time. Because I was born early in the school year and he was born late in his, we were only one grade apart. I was pretty much always a quiet, shy goody-goody while he was rambunctious and disinterested in academics. I think, like Mason, he felt unfairly compared to me when he would start the school year with a teacher I had had the year before.

Mason and Samantha grew and became able to relate to each other without constantly fighting. That happened with my brother and I as well. There were years where we absolutely couldn’t stand each other (including a time when he carved my name into the wooden bannister to try to get me in trouble. It’s funny to all of us now but holy shit was our Mom pissed). Also, as they went through those horrors with the alcoholic step-dad, their bond grew. You could see that they recognized that, at times, they only had each other and needed to be on the same team. Especially when the adults in their lives weren’t exactly dependable.

Luckily, my brother and I led a pretty happy childhood. Nobody ever threw glasses at us. Now that we are both adults, we realize that we have a relationship we will never share with anyone else in the world. The bond of genetics and shared history. The same sense of humor. My brother lives on the other side of the state now and we only see each other a few times a year. When we do, though, it’s like no time has passed. No one but the other can make us start laughing that quickly. And what we laugh at would strike an outsider as absurdity.

The sibling relationship sparked the biggest nostalgia-wave for me, but it wasn’t the only “madeleine in the tea”, so to speak. My mother got her Masters degree at Saint Martin’s when I was 7 or so and she brought me a few times to sit in her classes, just as Olivia brought Mason. I hadn’t thought about that for years, until I saw that scene and was suddenly transported back to…1995, maybe? Sitting in a hot, chalk-dusty classroom and drawing while the adults talked about things that went way over my head. Unlike Olivia, my mother didn’t marry her professor. A lot of her professors were monks, though, and she was still married to my dad, so I’m not really shocked.

There were many other, smaller aspects of being a kid during that time that the film captured with an authenticity that I think only a movie made in that unique way could. I remember when people smoked in bowling alleys (and restaurants). I lived for Harry Potter Midnight book releases (Ravenclaw for life!). I had the American Apparel track jacket that Mason is wearing on his 15th birthday. Mine was red and I bought it with my first ever paycheck when I was 16. That long, side swiped hair boys used to wear spurs memories of high school crushes. Lots of little things.

Boyhood guided me on a memory tour of my own girlhood, despite the “inspiring”/eye rolling, young adult pseudo-philosophy they laid on so thick at the end (“Like, what does it all mean, maaaaaan”). Maybe not even “despite” that. I thought I was super deep when I was 18, too.

The sun was warm, the wind was cold and I was laying on my back on top of a grassy hill watching the clouds coalesce, drift, collide, and disperse, in their ceaseless, nebulous dance. I stared straight upward at the zenith of the sky as I had not done since I was very young, when I would lay in the back yard of my mother’s house and, looking up into the darkest center of the sky, and tracing a line down to the horizon, I had to wonder how anyone could have ever believed the earth was flat.

And then waves of frantic, energetic music swept across the square. A violin, with two deep beats of a bass drum punctuating at regular intervals. The kind of music which calls to attention anyone and everyone it reaches and demands that they be present in this moment and observe the visceral reality of it.  The kind of music which usurps your thoughts, the kind of beat which reigns your heart into step. I looked toward the sun and could almost feel my body being swung around it in space, as it has done nearly twenty seven times already since I emerged and began my observations, and as it will continue to do, after my observations have ceased, for such epochs as my mind will never be able to comprehend. Such lengths of time had passed before I began and such lengths will pass after I’m gone as to make my life, and this moment, seem so infinitesimally brief. I can not help but inhale the cool air, stretch my muscles and tendons, soak in the light of that beautiful and terrible source of all motion on the surface of this great ball of coagulated energy, and exhale a long slow sigh in the form of the deepest gratitude a mind can muster that I could be awake in this passing moment, in this ever changing place. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to believe that it would last forever.

And the music stops.

Presently, it is 4 am and I have awoken very much full of life energy. I want to go on an adventure in the crisp full moon air or at least have my love in company to chat with. Neither are possibilities, so I sit and write about my desire for them instead. I am reminded of the beginning pages of Swann’s way and the narrators reflection on sleep. I am having my own. What a strange thing it is, and more relevant lately, the cycles in which we may find ourselves. Perhaps as a by product of my sickness, the sleepiness has begun in my body at an earlier time, around 6 o’clock. I sleep then, then wake around midnight, wherein my lover joins me for slumber and cuddles alone, then rest after a couple hours awake again until early morning, where I may stare at the ceiling until it is time to begin the day properly. This schedule is a much worse use of my time. But, with the many awakenings within this time frame not mentioned in the grand outline of it, I have many dreams that linger with me. I do not remember many right after, nor now days later, but I feel their emotion stay on the tip of my heart and slide over into my dealings with the waking world. Often, the emotion is anger, though I don’t quite know where the strong presence of it follows from. There is not much to be angry about in my life, but maybe I only repress this emotion well enough that I do not even notice what sparks it within me anymore- or at least I do rarely. I suppose, if we were to truly look at that emotional landscape within me right now, we may see that I am harboring anger right now. I am upset that I had to fall asleep alone, that the plans were changed, and now that I missed the opportunity to regain my lover that came knocking mere hours ago with too deep a slumber and who is in the midst of the depths of his own currently. I do not want to lay in bed and write, though it is good for me, but instead be in the arms of another. And still more things, as I think on anger, come into mind- the forcible lie of omission weighing heavy on my chest strongest among them. The word forcible used because though I would rather be honest and fully transparent in my proceedings, the lover does not want to hear of it all despite my given freedom. I know that you, reader, most likely have no idea of what I’m saying, but it as clear as day to me. He would rather be kept in the dark, even if my love for him never falters but instead increasingly grows in a slow but consistent manner. I have never enjoyed the company of one so much I don’t think, and yet he is insecure enough not to listen to the explanations of my heart and my mind. It is suffocating to feel like I am living in a lie, yet knowing that the truth would rather not be heard, just kept silent. It makes me feel like there is dirt underneath my fingernails and behind my ears that will not be scrubbed clean and yet the skin feels raw. How does one breach a conversation that will break a lover’s heart, when nothing has changed for them in the heart of yourself?

Music can at times for me be the source of much feeling and emotion, even when the song may be new to me and I have no prior memory’s attached to it to add to it that depth of feeling nostalgia may allow for. There is oft not anything in it so solid and stable that I can grasp onto it long enough to pin it down with words, or even images, but the feeling I get from the music lingers well after it has finished playing. After reading about Swann’s experience with Vinteuils’s sonata for piano and violin, I at once felt an urgent and compressing desire to hear for myself the cause of this ecstasy of Swann’s. My curiosity was not of no avail, it was rather simple to find with the aid of youtube. My disappointment, of which I must admit to having, thereby came not from the lack finding this song but rather from this song not eliciting from me the same emotional wells as it did from Swann. Perhaps the song had been ruined for me before listening to it, by the overly high expectations that I’d let slip into my head. I am not meaning to insinuate that it wasn’t a lovely song, it was beautiful, I just didn’t connect with it on the same emotional planes. Later that night, however, I experienced that almost spiritual feeling I’d earlier in the day been looking so hard for in Vinteuil’s sonata, but in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. I found it through listening to Rachmaninov, a favorite composer of mine. it was in the suggestions and I clicked on it without much expectation for what I was about to experience. Within the first few minutes it’d transported me to this high place where I felt as if I was bathing in sun rays and the breeze carried me softly through a meadow where nymphs danced and reveled. I did not see this visually, this is just the visual interpretation of how this song made me feel, as I do not know how to attempt describing it in words in any other way.

4/4/15

As I read Proust I am reminded of a book i recently read called Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, this book explores the legitimacy of hallucinations and line between experience and interaction. He argues experiencing hallucinations doesn’t necessarily mean a person is mentally unsound, it is when one interacts with their appertains that they are truly ill. Proust’s narrator seems to constantly walk this line between passive hallucinations and interactive hallucinations. The unreliable narration of this book leaves much to speculation but I believe the narrator has an anxiety disorder and a mild form of autism. He feels so separated from the world, emotionally unable to connect. He docent follow social courtesies and has trouble imagining scenario that haven’t actually happened, which is a common symptom of autism. Proust blurs the lines between delusion and reality to the point where I get lost in his inner wold and barely notice when the external information shows through, it is confusing and dense.

I am really excited for this project. I thought I wanted to pursue oral history/memoir re: my parents, but then I saw the actual prompts and couldn’t make it fit. I do still want to do that project, but this isn’t the space. I toyed with a more typical memoir, tied to literary research around memoirs for a YA audience, because I used to say that my journals read like a YA novel, and I stand by that as far as some of my teenage years. Or I guess mental-illness memoirs could be another area, or the construction of mental illness and its categories/symptoms and treatment over time. I used to think about constructing a history of the hospital I went to, when I was there. I feel like I’m at the bottom of the fig tree. What I came to, though, from the final prompt of “historical representation fieldwork,” is monuments. I think they’re very fertile territory for creative, critical & research projects. Also they provide a way to expand/extend my final paper into an ILC/study abroad in France. Or a longer term project of researching, photographing, interviewing, traveling. I still want to incorporate an oral/communal history element. Interviews will be hard, even harder en Français, mais je pense qu’ils sont importants et necessaire…

…

I feel like I’ve gotten sort of sucked onto this path of examining history-making through a creative/critical lens. I would say serendipity, but I’m not sure I’m happy about it. Am I latching onto the monuments idea because it “makes sense” after last quarter and into next quarter, rather than because I want to? When I finally have the opportunity to work on a memoir, a project I’ve always talked about, in a structured environment, which is the only way I ever get anything done? Is this the wrong thing? What am I supposed to do? What about France? Do I really want this? What do I want? It’s my education, my work. Make the work you’re engaged with, right? Fig tree.

…

I’ve been thinking more about my monuments idea and realized there’s a big problem: to fully realize it/realize it in its ideal form, I’d have to interview strangers, and that runs so counter to my personality & anxiety. I don’t know if this is the context in which I’d call my anxiety disorder a disability; I think a lot of people would feel unable to take on that task. I don’t know. Maybe if I try really hard to channel my friend Ellen [who is a reporter for her college TV station and interviews people on the street all the time], I could do it.

But maybe it’s better to work on the memoir, which I think I really want. What if I still want to go to France? I don’t know.

…

I want to do the memoir. The idea of engaging with something for basically nine more weeks looks pale and sad when it’s monuments. That idea did flow really well from the work I did last quarter, but so what? When else am I going to start a project I’ve been talking about forever? Now the question is what I want my research component to be. I mentioned young adult literature and mental illness memoirs, but both of those are pretty big categories. If I go down the YA lit path, it would be interesting to consider how reading so many of those novels affected how I thought about and recorded (in my journals and in my memory) the events of my life at that time (ages 13-17 basically, but a few specific moments primarily). Rather than working with or against patterns of literature in my own memoir, exactly, the critical component would be more metacognitive analysis of my memory and how it’s constructed around this scaffold of the literary forms I was so engaged with at the time. If I go down the mental-illness-memoir path, I’m not sure what exactly I’d want to do. Maybe trying to set my work up against patterns I see? Or I could do historical tracking of how my illness & its treatments came to be, epistemologically. Like, the antecedents to my experience, or how a person with my symptoms/qualities would have been characterized in different time periods. I’m not sure how exactly that would work with the memoir, but I know it would color the telling of the tale, and could possibly be integrated with it, rather than producing two separate but complementary pieces of writing. I’m also considering the sub-subgenre of “YA mental illness memoir” but I don’t really know what I would do there. Also, my illness/recovery time frame begins in the YA age range, but climaxes and ends well out of it, so I don’t know how relevant it would be to combine those paths. I’ve climbed out onto a branch but I’m still in the fig tree. I have a little time to figure it out, though.

Within his own mind, Proust wrote a novel describing the inner workings of mind, body, memory, and personal identity. Proust opens his mind to the memory and identity, how memory affects and contributes to personal identity. When the protagonist of the novel describes the memories of his mother and her kiss, it triggers a similar feeling in me. As a young boy, the narrator goes through an inner conflict of waiting until his mother came up the staircase to kiss her or go to bed without his mothers kiss. Similar to the young boy, I had an inner conflict whether to kiss my mother good night or not. Until about the age of 10, I depended on my mother for everything. She told me when to eat and what to eat, what to wear and how to wear it, and how to live my daily life. I felt like my mother was me, just a larger version. The young boy struggled with his decision the way I struggled with mine, he made a decision based on what his mother would think of him not of what his consequences would be. I would have the same sense of mind, as I grew older the conflicts in my mind regarding my mother ceased to exist in the way they used to. I learned to find myself in a way that I never knew existed, the memory of my mother being everything about me allowed me identify myself away from her. My mother loved me in a way different from she loved my sisters, she always assured that I had everything I needed and wanted. The connection between Proust and his mother opens my mind to how my mothers love was “normal” in its own way. Throughout my life, and in the current moments, I finally realize, I have my own normal and my own sense of identity.

Well, I guess the best place to start would be in the city of Honolulu on the 20th day of October in the year of  our lord 1992, the 216th year of the Independence of the United States of America and the day of my birth. My mother has always told me that at the moment of my birth, a bright star fell from the sky, as if that heavenly body, waiting and gathering light for an eternity, could, at long last, pour itself into my corporeal form. After passing the usual neonatal bureaucracies: apgar tests, bronzing of the umbilical cord, inspection of my body for any imperfections, the wine bath, etc. I was placed in my mother’s arms. I have always had a preternatural sensitivity for the dark thoughts which come unbidden to men during only their most despairing or bitter hours and so before I had even opened my eyes, when I felt the rough skin of my mothers hands, wet from the exertion of her labors, I felt the terrible irony that mocks anyone who has ever known their mother, if only for this first touch. That when we first came into this world, we were alone, confined within her womb, the first thing we perceived was the inkblack slime of our prison, then, having spent months in contemplative solitude, imagining the sins we must have committed to deserve this sentence, we are wrestled out of that inscrutable envelope and given to a strange, weeping giant who is our mother, who’s face we have never seen. My mother read this all in my face and with an intuition befitting her new title gave me my name, Kekoa, Hawaiian for ‘One who will have a hard time adjusting in High School.’

As you can well imagine, growing up in Honolulu, during the shadow of the fall of the Soviet Union, was a desperate and trying time that only exacerbated the melancholic imbalance of my humors. In school, I would spin the classroom globe and thumb through the atlases wistfully, my eye would fall onto the big, orange, blob labeled, U.S.S.R. and I would think to myself, ‘When will my scholastic geographic learning materials reflect today’s reality, my reality?’ At night, I would awake to find my awesome race car bed sopping with sweat— just sweat, absolutely no other liquid excretions besides sweat— I had broken free from some Delphic fever-dream where I saw myself touching smart boards with both hands, ecstatically utilizing cutting-edge multimedia approaches to learning and I would gnash my teeth together with impotent desire, ‘One day,’ I would murmur to myself, ‘One day, I will carry in the palm of my hand a map so advanced and so detailed that I will be able to count every rose in the gardens of Versailles. Then! Then! As a final act of triumphant disdain over the  first, second, and third dimensions, completely ignore that opportunity that I might obsess over the virtual, insipid gestures of my oversexed peers.’ Of course, the fall of Communism is not just a defining moment in the geographical education of a young man, it also marks an awakening into the world of political economics. I realized at an early age that everything in life could be assigned a value in dollars (or gold) and then judged against anything else in life by this standard. It was for this reason that I became the youngest person ever in the history of the universe to understand the concept of private property and theft. I would steal one coin everyday from my mother’s coin collection and hide them underneath the rubber sheets of my race car bed. This is what is known as diversifying your portfolio against prorated long-time annuity bonds federal tax-deductible vertical integration paradigms and if you want to be rich like me, order my book, “Proactive Inheritance: How to Steal From your Mother And Still Get Into Heaven!” Call toll-free at (425)478-0116 and tell them I sent you! That’s (425)478-0116! Call today!