For the first time in my life, I traveled outside of the US.  I took a plane ride that took 14.5 hours, crossed the International Date Line, and landed in Australia.

Talk about having a first hand experience of Time and Space.  On my way to Australia, I lost a day…just gone, which didn’t seem that weird to me, I was so lost in the excitement of being in a foreign country that it didn’t really dawn on me.  But, after being there for 9 days, I really had a hard time wrapping my brain around going back in time when I came home.  I left the Sydney airport at 11:30 am on Thursday, May 28th.  I flew 13 hours and 11 minutes and landed in Los Angeles at 7:46 am on Thursday, May 28th.  I arrived home 4 hours before I left!  I understand the concept of no time.  Time is just something that was made up by people to keep track of things.  But since I have been living in a consciousness that keeps time and measures most things by using time, for the past nearly 39 years, it is odd to lose or gain a day.  I don’t really know how to explain how strange it is to have that experience and how strange it is to have the understanding that time is Not linear, but like a spiral, and that all things are happening at the same “time”, there is no past or future.  Without having time to give us a point of reference, we would be lost, floating in an abyss.  We need time in order to exist.  We need time to tell stories and have an understanding of things.  But, in reality, it doesn’t exist.

” I was distressed to see how little I relived my early years. I found the Vivonne narrow and ugly alongside the towpath. Not that I noticed any great physical discrepancies from what I remembered. But, separated as I was by a whole lifetime from places I now happened to be passing through again, there was lacking between them and me that contiguity, from which is born, even before we have perceived it, the immediate, delicious and total deflagration of memory.” (Proust, Vol.VI. 2)

I think this is when the narrator is differentiating his childhood (or early)memory and adult. I also think this passage shows the (lack of better words) evolution of the narrator from “boyhood” to “adulthood.”  I think this is important because yes as you get older and you come back to things that you use to do as a kid or see everyday as a young adult, child, whichever you see as an adult differently. For the narrator it’s Combray  and the paths he took with his family and the people he interacted with such as Gilberte. He even notices the difference in his memory of the church of Combray. I remember in the first Volume when the narrator talks about the church at Combray he talks about it how the steeple looks like a loaf of bread and he describes the cathedral using magical imagery and metaphors. Now he describes it as dull, dark blue and even colourless. When Gilberte tells the narrator that she has liked him all along and that as a child/ “young naughty girl” she gave him signals to convey her attraction towards him. The Narrator then realizes that he not very perceptive of not only of his own memory but women too because he then goes into how he perceived Albertine too.

“Dad’s going to take me to Judo with him!”   I only get to watch while Dad and my younger brother John get to play. Girls aren’t allowed in judo. I really hate being a girl.

When we get to the club, Dad sticks me in the box that is used to store the mats and tells me to sit nicely and be quiet. I try, really try to sit still, but I want to play judo too. I wriggle around and fidget: then I decided that it wouldn’t really hurt anyone if I copied the exercises. I pull up my skirt to get it out of the way, spread my legs, and start to stretch just like the boys.

Grandpa notices and he looks mad. Dad walks over and stands me up, straightening my skirt, and tells me to sit and stay still, “Judo is not for girls.” I sit for a while, and then just can’t any more, and I start doing sit-ups with the class. Dad comes back over and this time, I get spanked and told “Judo isn’t lady-like and your mother would kill me- Sit.”

A few minutes later, I just have to try a summersault. I look at my dad and see him talking with Grandpa and Sensei. They are not looking my way, so I try another. Suddenly, I’m lifted out of the box and handed a pair of judo pants; “go put these on” Sensei says as he pushes me toward the bathroom.

Breathless with excitement, I run to change. When I get back to the dojo, Dad and Grandpa are waiting for me with a lecture, and wanting a promise from me. “You can’t tell your mother,” Grandpa says. He goes on to explain that if I wanted to join the class, I couldn’t tell anyone. Sensei tells me that he knows about a couple of ladies that do judo. So, if I follow all the rules and keep the secret I will be allowed to play. I’m good at keeping secrets; and this isn’t the first one Grandpa has asked me to keep.

I love the judo class; the physical exercise, the tumbling, the power of throwing someone, and the feeling of belonging, being one of the boys- almost. The secret was hard to keep from my mother and it made me sad that I couldn’t share this wonderful place where I belonged.

At home and school I tried even harder to behave like a girl. I helped with the housework, stayed indoors except when accompanying my mother on one of her walks or when I was forced to go out for recess at school. I tried to stay quiet, in the background, and be obedient.

My grandparents lived only a few blocks from our house and my brother and I often went there after school for dinner. One evening when Grandpa was watching us, John punched me, and I cried. Grandpa called me over and shook me by the shoulders, “If you are going to behave like a boy, then you better defend yourself. Either you stand up and beat him, or I will beat you.” I turned around timidly, not really sure what was expected of me, to face John who was standing there laughing. “She’s just a girl, she can’t beat me” he yelled, and I hung my head to cry harder.

Then, John pushed me, and I got mad. I wasn’t going to let him beat on me and then have to take another one from Grandpa. So I grabbed him and the fight was on. He punched me and pulled my hair. He bit and kicked and gave everything he had to hurt me. And with Grandpa yelling at me, I fought back. When he hit me, I threw him; when he kicked, I hit harder. Within a few minutes, John gave up and ran; I ran after him. I had been restrained for so long; all my anger came out, directed at my brother, the bully. I grabbed him tightly and threw him one last time, and he didn’t get up. Grandpa was cheering and I was feeling great. Then Grandma came in the room, and we were all in trouble, including Grandpa. She demanded to know what was going on and why he was telling me to fight like a boy. Grandpa gave up our secret and told her that they had let me start Judo class. He also said that he didn’t think it was right that I had to put up with being hit by my brother at home, so he made me fight back.

A little later that evening, my parents came over and they all went into the living room and John and I were banished to the back rooms. We could hear lots of yelling and upset voices, but couldn’t really tell what was being said. We did know that it was about judo. I spent the evening wondering if I would be allowed back to class. John and I fell asleep before they finished talking, and we were taken home without waking up.

When I woke the next morning my dad was very quiet and Mom was mad. She told me to fix breakfast for everyone and to get dressed nicely. After they had all eaten, I sat down to have my long hair brushed out and braided. Mom yelled at me that she wasn’t going to do that for me anymore, especially since I wanted to act like a boy. Dad herded my brother and me to his car, and told my mom that he would take care of it. I felt strange and kept running my fingers through my hair, trying to comb it out. I had never left the house without it being brushed and tied up. We pulled up in front of the barbers and got out of the car. I guessed that Dad and John were getting their hair cut like they always did. This time I was put in the barber’s chair, and Dad told the man to cut mine as short as he could without shaving it. I cried all the way through the haircut. I didn’t recognize myself when it was done.

On the way home Dad told me something that confused me. I could be in judo if I were a boy. But at home, I had to be a girl and behave like one and help my mother when she asked. The haircut was so I could remember that being a boy could only happen at judo. It seemed as if my Mom cried for weeks. She couldn’t even look at me.

I went back to Judo class that week and had the best time. I was finally allowed to participate with the boys, learning as much as them. Only occasionally would Sensei tell me that I needed to do the technique “like a girl” or sit properly “like a girl.” At home, I tried to stay out of Mom’s way, dress neatly, keep quiet, and do as I was told. I still managed to get in trouble almost every day. All it took was a flicker of expression on my face when I was told to do something, a moment too long to respond to a call, a task not completed to perfection, anything at all and she would take out Dad’s belt and start swinging it like a whip. She frequently threatened to punish me by taking my books or my other favorite possessions. I lost all access to the outdoors both, at home and for recess at school. I was not allowed to have any friends. The only thing that she didn’t threaten to take away from me was my judo class and therefore, it became my sanctuary. It was the only place I belonged and could be myself, a place of victory over my home life and my mom.

As we were getting ready for a tournament one Sunday, Dad told both John and I to bring our uniforms. When we got there, he was filling out paperwork and we both had to weigh in. We were going to compete!! John was called first and he won his match. Then I was called; my match only lasted seconds before I was declared the winner. We went back and forth this way, both of us beating every opponent. Then both John and I were called up at the same time; we would be fighting each other. This match lasted a long time. John was afraid of what would happen if he hurt me and I was afraid of what would happen if I beat him. The referee stopped the match, called us both together, and ordered us to fight “or else”. Neither of us knew what “or else” might be, so we began to fight in earnest. Just as the timer went off, I threw John and won the match.

When the awards for the tournament were given, my name was called. I had placed 1^st and would get a gold medal. I stepped up to the front of the room to receive my award. The head instructor hesitated and bent over to me to quietly ask; “Are you a girl?” I thought it was an odd question, but answered anyway, “Yes”. He said “oh, I need to talk to your instructor before I can give this to you.” I didn’t know what that meant. Dad came over and talked to the Sensei and then they announced a change to the awards. I had been disqualified- for being a girl.

My Instructor called me over to the side and told me that he needed me to meet someone. She was older, tall, and red-headed, just like me. Her name was Rusty Kanokogi; she practiced Judo in New York and had been to the Kodokan to study. I was told she had won tournaments and then had her medal taken away. We corresponded once or twice a year, for much of my childhood and she soon became a mentor as well as an example of a female judo player to me.

After reading Kindred, I came up with my perfect program: Proust + Faulkner (+ Butler). It would have to be at least 2 quarters long, and have less of an overarching project element than this program, so we could really get involved with such a huge amount of text. I’d want it to be all of In Search of Lost Time, or at least selections throughout like we did here, and at least a few volumes of Faulkner, with whom I’m not familiar enough to guess what would make a good program (I read Go Down, Moses in high school, and that’s it, but I know that they pretty much all overlap and intertwine). It would be great to do it with faculty with expertise in French and American history and literature, a lot like this program. I’m kind of sad now that I’ve already read the Proust so it won’t be fresh to take this imaginary program! It would be so great: memory, history, time; the events of the mid 19th through early-mid 20th centuries and how there were world events but also totally different national and regional preoccupations (which is much less true in our highly globalized modern world); the difference between telling a long story with one narrator and telling it in a fragmented, multi-perspective, multi-generational way…it would be so cool.

This is the type of thought process that makes me feel sure I have to go to grad school and be ‘an academic’ forever because this is one of the few things I get really excited about (others include contemporary folk-rock music, television, and food, none of which are really futures for a non-musician, non-filmmaker who would much rather eat than cook). I know some academics view teaching as a drudgery to be endured in order to research and write but teaching excites me too! Like as much as I want to take this program I imagined, I would also love to teach it, even though I know how frustrating undergraduates can be, because I am already frustrated by my peers a non-zero amount of the time. But sometimes they’re also impressive, exciting, invigorating, surprising, and inspiring, so I don’t think teaching could be all bad; probably far from it.  Most of the time I dread the future, because that’s just how my brain is wired (thanks, anxiety disorder), but sometimes, like now, I get hopeful and excited and super, super nerdy. Yay books! Yay the future!

I asked Will, my husband to come to the interview with me because it’s a 2 hour drive and I wanted the company. We used to commute together when we both worked for Mt Rainier and the drive brought back many pleasant memories. Russ’s house is tucked up a windy hill in Packwood Washington. You drive down a gravel road, passed his gate and park in front of his garage which is covered in antlers.

Russ doesn’t hunt. He finds the antlers in the woods, brings them home and keeps them. He does this with bones, feathers, sticks, and anything else natural he may encounter. I can relate to this. I was the type of kid that came home from the beach with pockets filled with shells, sea glass and pretty rocks I’d found. My room had abandoned bird nests on my shelves; feathers tucked everywhere and brightly colored dried leaves from the previous fall. Anything from nature I could carry made its way into my room.

When I met Russ, we bonded right away. The first time the wildlife crew picked him up at his house, I discovered a museum of animal skulls, neatly preserved on shelves made of stripped devil’s club branches. I collected animal skulls as well. Of course I had at the time maybe 4 skulls, while Russ must have had over a hundred. The first time I decided to add animal skulls to my growing collection of natural items, I’d found a dead skunk on some train tracks. Dried in the sun, the skin was mostly gone and I was able to pull the head from the body with ease. Being 16 and really stupid; I used my mom’s favorite cooking pot to boil the skull in water on the stove (I’d read somewhere that was how you got the brains out). When my mom came home the house smelled like nothing I can describe and I had to throw her pot in the trash after a good tongue lashing.

Russ thought this story was funny when I told him. He’d perfected cleaning skulls long ago, but knew the trials and errors that new bone collectors go through. He, like myself, collected animal skulls because we loved wildlife. We found the skulls to be a way to connect with animals we could not get close to when alive. We both marveled at how the bone structures differed between species and found this incredibly fascinating. Take the beaver skull for instance; its lower jaw is immense, evolved to allow for huge chewing muscles to break apart woody material, or a bird skull, light as air and bones hollow for better flight.

When I asked Russ if I could interview him for my project he was a little leery. He is a very quiet and reserved man. He doesn’t like people much, preferring to spend his time in the woods. However when I explained I just wanted to hear some of his wildlife stories from the park he was eager to help. I’d hoped to interview his friend Joe as well, another volunteer from the park and I was delighted to discover Joe waiting at the house as well when we arrived.

Russ herds us into his dining room, the walls covered in book shelves filled with books, natural things and of course skulls. At first glance, his house is very overwhelming, every nook and cranny is filled with something natural; there is no blank wall space, no empty shelves. Everywhere there is something to look at; every item placed with care and love. For someone like me, who loves the natural world it is a feast for my eyes and soul. I can see before me a lifetime of moments and memories and experiences spent in the woods. In the living room we pass by a stack of antlers next to the couch, in fact the stack is bigger than the couch. It’s grown since I last was in the house a few years ago. What I love most about being in his house is the feeling you get of being close to nature. Each thing I see is a window into a hidden world.

Russ and Joe take seats facing each other with me at the head of the table. I am surprised to see my husband sit down at the other end. I thought he was going to wait in the car.  I start by asking some basic questions about where Joe and Russ live, their ages, their backgrounds. Once this is over I ask Russ to tell me the story about the Bald Eagle he found while hiking in the park. He’d told me it once a long time ago and I hoped it would be a good starting place.

The stories are easy to get out of Russ and Joe, but they are reserved men and passed this I start to struggle a little. I am trying to get them to tell me more about the park and how they see it. They seem to be holding back and I know this will take some patience. Suddenly my husband breaks in and responds to something Joe has said. I feel annoyed as I realize I will have to take this out when I dictate the interview. Russ and Joe know Will from the park so the conversation starts to shift from formal interview to conversation. I try to ask another question to get my husband to shut up and Russ and Joe back on track, yet it just leads to my husband talking more. I try the glare tactic and give my husband the best “I am going to throttle you” look I can across the table, yet he seems immune.

Joe asks Will about the park’s management team; Will was employed with the park for 14 years and often has insights into the culture I do not. I can sense the comradery growing between Joe and Will because Will now works for the Forest Service which is what Joe did before he retired. This leads the conversation off track completely, yet I can see a general ease and relaxation occurring with Joe as he talks to Will. I wait patiently, adding up the minutes in my head that have been wasted and imagine all the painful things I am going to do to my husband when we get home.

Yet 10 minutes in I have given up trying to keep control. As the conversation flows, it moves toward resource management and I get caught up in it. Russ too, has joined in, and it feels more like a get together with friends than an interview. I manage to get in a question from my notes and all of us tackle it together; each adding our own experiences in a tangible, fluidic pace. I realize I am getting material I would never have been able to pull from a strict interview setting. These men are cautious and slightly aloof.  They thrive in the woods where things are grounded and open. They are no longer participating in an interview; they are sitting back with friends, talking about what they love. They have forgotten the recording device sitting in the middle of the table; Russ is leaning back in his chair smiling and Joe is talking, his face animated and his hands dancing in front of his face as he describes a time he confronted a visitor about walking off trail. I find it easy to gently steer the conversation in the direction I need. And by the end I know I have some amazing stuff recorded. As we get in the car to leave I turn to my husband and point to the recording device. He looks down at it and back up at me with an apologetic look in his eye. I smile and thank him for hijacking my interview.

I have to get off my chest how annoying I think the narrator is. I am really trying to find the good in him. I really am.  Albertine is gone, and he says things like “The memory of Albertine had become so fragmentary that it no longer caused me any sadness and was no more now than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announces a change of key. And indeed, any idea of a passing sensual whim being rules out, in so far as I was still faithful to Albertine’s memory, I was happier at having Andree in my company than I would have been at having an Albertine miraculously restored” (p.809).  How awful! He comes across fickle and frivolous and shallow.

One difficulty I have had with this book is the lack of ability to connect with the narrator. I have no problem connecting with Proust. I can hear him often in the writing trying to lay Easter eggs that represent his view points on sexuality, religion and more. His descriptions are so detailed that I can sometimes vividly see the scenes and feel the emotions described.  This I enjoy. However, the narrator, his character, his personality, his motives… I can’t relate to. I can’t get behind. I can’t even contemplate! This stops me from getting lost in the reading. I often find myself jerked aware from my reading by something the narrator says that just rubs me wrong. I wonder if this happens to anyone else while reading these novels. Like I said, Proust I am cool with, it’s the narrator I want throw over my lap and give a good spanking to!

My husband and I talk about the past to keep it alive. We went through a really bad experience with his family three years ago. It was over (until recently) and we had moved on, yet we found ourselves filling long car rides or late night conversations in bed with a “re-hashing” or the events. During the first year after we’d moved away, we were filled with frustration and unresolved anger; bringing up the memories only made the feelings fresh again. Yet it helped us work through what had happened to us; even though it meant repeating the memories over and over again.

By the second year we revisited the memories less often and with a much lower degree of emotion involved. We repeated the events in order as if to preserve them, to keep them whole in our minds. By the third year we didn’t talk about it as much. Just once in a while one of us would dip their toe into the past and stir up the muck that has settled at the back of our minds.

The memories of this time allowed us to heal. Like scrap books, we could choose to open them whenever we wanted and relive moments that caused us pain. This process was in a way cathartic; allowing us to sort through how we felt and find resolution in our own way. Memories reflected the pain and confusion of those events; which in the beginning ran fresh through our daily lives. By the third year the anger had subsided. We didn’t think about the past anymore, yet when we needed to we could pull the memories down from the shelf and open the pages of preserved emotion to remember.

With current events in our life forcing us back down the route we escaped from three years ago, I can now see the value in memory.  It has given us the healing we needed and prepared us for this new challenge we are facing with his family. By revisiting and keeping those memories alive we are confident in ourselves and what happened in the past so that we can face the present with strength.

“But above all we must remember this: on the one hand, lying is often a trait of characters; on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, it is a natural defense, be liars, it is a natural defense, improvised at first, then more and more organized, against that sudden danger which would be capable of destroying a life: love.”

This passage stood out to me because I think proust is saying that women who are not natural liars, lie to protect themselves from love. Any one lies to protect themselves from love, not just women. It can’t be blamed on a particular sex, it’s the individual. The character that Proust writes about who are “destroyed” by the love of these women characters are dramatic if you ask me. They get so caught up in the obsession that they forget that these women initially ignored them and didn’t show any interest. But they go on and obsess and then eventually lose their minds trying to get over them after the fact or can’t get enough of them. Just saying.

Kindred by Octavia Butler reminds me of a book similar to this sci-fi aspect of traveling back in time to a historical point. The book is called, “Ann Frank and Me.” by married couple: Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld, this book was inspired by the life of Ann Frank. The girl goes on a class field trip to the museum for the Holocaust, each student is assigned a person who was alive during that time. Something happens that she is knocked unconscious and when she wakes up, she wakes as her character. She goes through this epic journey being put on the trains, into camps and even coming across Ann Frank.  The girl that travels lived durring the early 2000’s and she also has to adapt to a time and place she is not use to.  Although, Dana traveled to a time where she was some what relevant (her ancestors) so that would be the differences between the two novels, but surviving, sexism, racism and classism definitely come through these books helping me understand the impressionism of these time periods.

Kindred shows a reoccurring theme of sexism and classism but also racism thats been through out Prousts “In Search of Lost Time.” The male characters come off as dominant, over compensating and frightened of a woman with any time of power. Particularly  “black women” but also “Black women who are educated.” Men during this time and in Prousts book believe a woman’s place is only in the household, to bare children, to be silent and submissive to them. The female characters are everything but those characteristics. My favorite character through out the volume of Swann In Love was Odette. She had such a hold on Swann and it came off to me as a powerful attraction that she used to her advantage. Another female character that seemed “dumb” to the male character of the narrator, but was beyond that, was Albertine. These characteristics were apparent in the character of Dana in Kindred.   She obviously came from the 1970’s and during that time in the US women have rights, interracial relationships were more open (shammed but opened) and being plunged into the antebellum south during the 1800’s from such a time would be a great slap in the face. It’s like starting all over again, when she wasn’t even alive to “start” you know?  I couldn’t imagine this, one I’m not black, but I am a woman and having been raised to be independent and not rely on a man for anything, but also that i can date which ever man no matter their skin color  would be a hard thing to learn to not do. So Dana definitely had to adapt to survive. Not only did she have to adapt, but once Kevin traveled in time with her she stressed about his survival. I thought it was weird, that he seemed fairly comfortable living durring this time period because he’s white and a man he had more power than he had when he was in the 1970’s.