It is hard sometimes to separate the author from a text; Stacey reminded us during seminar that the characters in In Search of Lost Time are not real people. But damn it, sometimes it seems like they may have been. I imagine Proust, locked away in his apartment, drugged up, creating a story – a mammoth, wordy, longest-sentence-in-the-universe kind of story – that leaves me to wonder how much is from his imagination, and how much is bits and pieces of retrieved memories; people tend to write what they know.

This last week’s reading and the unfathomable kindness that Verdurins bestowed on poor old Saniette left me riddled with questions. I scoured the readers guide, looking for hints, clues as to what these often cruel people’s motives for such an unforeseen act of kindness may have been; do they in fact have hearts of gold?

Perhaps this is a problem with not reading the entirety of the text; we don’t see the whole picture. But even after perusing the readers guide at the back of Time Regained, I found not one snippet about either character that would give the reader a back story as to their motives. Maybe Gustave Verdurin (his name is revealed on a page we did not read) was beaten as a child by a cruel governess that led him to seek a match with Sidonie, a woman with an equally terrible upbringing, whom resembled his tormentor in stature and also in temperament. I could speculate for days but this goes back to what Stacey said, they are not real people. Proust, who could spend hundreds of pages going on and on about flowers and obsession and churches and paintings and artists and that damn little band of girls really could have stepped out of his observations of what the narrator thought was happening, and informed his readers – offered a bit of history – about the other characters in his book.

Even when he chooses to share about Swann, the narrator clarifies that he has been told that they share similar characteristics. It is all about M, all the time.

As we have yet to read Time Regained, I will hope for answers. What brought about the Verdurins change of heart? Will Gilberte and Saint-Loup weather the storm of their deceitful love? Will our narrator ever find love? And who gave Swann that damn note? Tune in next week for all the developments of 19^th century France’s version of As the World Turns, just with madeleines and a whole lot more misery.

Article: http://tinyurl.com/powcc2b

Walter Kirn embodies the theme of time and memory in his blog article for The New York Times. The relevancy to this program is thrown into the mix when the intro includes the question, “what if marcel Proust kept an Instagram?”. Readers follow the author’s recounting of his own memories with his children who, at the time, were actively flicking away their lives  on social media. The proposed question enticed me to ponder, only to conclude the following: if Proust could use Instagram today, I’m sure we’d find his followers clicking away at the “like” button under a sepia-filtered iphone shot of the church in combray. I am also sure we could still find the impressive 6 volume set of ” In Search of Lost Time”, whether It be in the form of books or in the changed form of a blog or youtube series. However, I do not feel that social media would strip away the analytical qualities which we have come to associate with proust. Whether my assumption is correct, or not, really comes down to the everlasting psychological debate of nurture versus nature. Regardless, my point is that social media or  journaling isn’t as negative as It was implied as.

Personally, I sense a connection between the author and Proust. Both individuals led a life (or at least a portion of it) before the convenience of cellphone cameras and wireless technology. The author describes memory as an imaginative act; one which people first imagine what we want to keep. Proust seems to do this in his own literature, highlighting and emphasizing his own specific memories. This memory selection in turn becomes the formation of one’s own personal life-narration, and it is a process which still stands today.

In regards to the authors children, I would say that they are apart of a larger collection of generations which include my own. My peers, the authors children and I have been absorbed by media and technology for our entire lives. This lifestyle is one which I seek to advocate for; a lifestyle where social media is an outlet for self-expression (however little creativity it may require). Social media has not replaced the formation of one’s own life narration. Instead, it has become a tool to help create our story. I would argue that social media can become a valuable life tool.

In contrast to Walter Kirn, I have journaled. Walter Kirn romanticizes the qualities of memories and of how it is written in a “smokey synapse”. He cites the absence of his journaling as a point of pride. However, my own experience with journaling has proved increasingly practical. I recently sifted through these entries, in addition to Instagram photos and old Facebook messages from my prepubescent years. The reflection of a physical documentation has gifted me my own personal insights and has thrown me into a past; one where the time’s mindset, the day’s weather, and the activity’s sensations could be re-lived. Archiving my thoughts and life has shown me where I have been physically and emotionally and has helped me decide clearly where I want to go. The utility of this documentation then reflection begins to resemble the basic idea of why we study history.

To the author;

Mr. Kirn, the beauty you see in the struggle of memory is the quality which makes us human, and behind that is the quality that makes us exist. We are beings of the now, limited to perceiving and acting upon the present moment. This limited access to the past, and unattainable knowing for the future is our biggest weakness. In some sci-fi story we could be all knowing beings; masters of time. In this reality, we are not. However, the tracking of our lives has the potential to broaden the extent of what we can recall from our lives. It can provide some existential outlook and perhaps bring us closer to being our own masters of our own universe. I encourage you to start your diary; it’s never too late.

1. I have too many other schoolwork-type-things to do: reading, reading, and more reading; research and writing for the Memory Project; reading and writing for Cultivating Voice, writing center appointments for Cultivating Voice practicum, academic statement, etc.
2. I have too many non-schoolwork things to do. This feels like a pathetic excuse when I know that many of my classmates have jobs and families in addition to their schoolwork and I have no such entanglements. Still, life seems to be composed of infinite errands, chores, phone calls, appointments, etc, and something has to give.
3. I don’t prioritize the journal. It doesn’t seem important to me when I’m not doing it. When I am actually engaged in reflective writing, it feels valuable, but when I’m not, it’s very easy to write it off as not enhancing my learning at all.
4. I am not a journal-er. I used to be, and I was obsessive about it: writing down every detail of my days and every thought I could hold onto long enough to bind it to paper. But I think I used all of my journaling energy in those years. Now I’d often rather think in conversation.
5. I have trouble with class journals or any type of ongoing assignment with no/few due dates. In eighth grade my math teacher only required homework to be in by the end of the month. You could turn it in every day, receive a stamp on your homework calendar, and probably improve your learning, but I always ended up leaving it all for the end of the month. Not coincidentally, eighth grade was also the first time I got less than an A in math. It’s very hard to do 20 homework assignments in one weekend, and also very hard to actually learn math concepts and skills without practicing. Though this journal is not exactly like those algebra problems, I should probably consider that the same principle may apply, that I might be depriving myself of an opportunity to learn and develop.
6. Trying/allowing myself to not care: when I understood that my attendance will probably prevent me from earning full credit, I gave up a little. I have always been a perfectionist, and for a perfectionist, “it won’t be perfect” is often followed by “so stop trying.” Giving up also allowed me to zone out when I am bored in seminar or lecture, to continue to hit snooze too many times, to turn in my project outline late. The thing is, though, that I do still care. I am trying to care less about perfection and credits, and more about learning, growth, and making good work, but I know in my wiser moments that showing up, paying attention, and writing and thinking reflectively and critically will help with both kinds of achievement.

Memories Go in the Memory Hole
How do we record memory? The classic method is to just tell somebody else, so it can be passed down as oral tradition. It can be written down, or demonstrated in a work of visual art. Advances in technology gave people the option of taking photographs and capturing sounds to record and supplement memory, and the consumerization of information technology put camcorders in the hands of many laypeople. This is where we get the phenomenon of home video. There are countless weddings, birthday parties, dance recitals, soccer games, first words and steps, all immortalized on VHS, gathering dust behind someone’s stereo, or in the archives of something like America’s Funniest Home Videos, alongside quirky and bizarre behaviors and performances by family, friends, or the videographer themself–that weird dance your uncle does when he’s had a few glasses of wine, that song your son performs playing the kazoo and drumming with his butt–shot and sent in in an attempt to get on TV. What will happen to them? Some of these videos must enter the Memory Hole: a channel on YouTube that compiles home videos into segments from thirty seconds to two minutes long, using tense electronic music and jumpy, distorted editing to emphasise the surreal, unsettling nature and underlying sense of dread in each composition. I’d really love to see whatever archive the editors have access to, because the videos they manage to source are really weird–like grown men meowing in synch at the camera for a minute and a half weird. I’ve included links to some of my favorites: a redneck in a bathtub delivering rhymes about toys, Valentine’s Day videos paired with clips of humans kissing animals, a supercut of people dancing and then of vomiting. Memory Hole shows off the strange imagination of everyday people, but the setting isn’t humorous. It’s actually really terrifying, and in this way I find Memory Hole videos closer to actual memory than your typical home movie, which is limited to a direct audiovisual record. Real memories are subjective. They contain omissions, details that don’t line up, and feelings that can’t easily be expressed through sound and light alone. Through editing, Memory Hole is able to splice in imagery, add atmosphere and reset tone, which is often lost in the transition from the moment to the objective record. Memory Hole wants us to look back at the not-so-distant past and think, “Wow, people are really odd,” and to be disquieted by it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Fluffer Video

Valentines Day

Dance Til U Puke

On page 24 of The Captive, Marcel is lying in bed after just having dismissed his girlfriend Albertine only a while before, and is wrapped up in his own “solipsistic” universe(solipsism: the philosophy that only the self exists). He had told Albertine that his reason for not venturing out with her was because his doctor forbade him to, a claim he admits to the reader is an out right lie. In fact, he says “if it had been true, his instructions would have been powerless to prevent me from accompanying my mistress(22).” In other words, if he had been told not to join her he would have done so just to be contumacious. His real reason for not accompanying her was due to his fear of exacerbating his already raging anxiety. “Whenever I went out with Albertine, if she left my side for a moment I became anxious, began to imagine that she had spoken to or simply looked at someone.” Being in the presence of his girlfriend provides him with far to many opportunities to over analyze her every move. Staying home and having her friends take her out allows him to defer that responsibility to them.

As he lies in bed, Francois comes into his room to stoke his fire, which allows him to reintroduce the theme of sensory memory. The twigs which she threw onto the fire would create a scent which “traced traced round the fire place a magic circle within which, glimpsing myself pouring over a book at Combray…”

Marcel is saying that the scent of the twigs only reaches a certain circumference around his fire, and thus it is only within that circle that the “magic” of memory takes place. The recollection is so intense he can actually see himself reading as a child. Marcel goes on to explain that the act of remembrance is the most enjoyable for those with a chronic illness, because the “tyranny” of their sickness keeps them from venturing out and creating new memories that are similar: “to seek in nature scenes that resemble those memories.” He adds that people in such circumstances don’t regard these memories as merely “pictures,” because they are convinced that they will soon be able to create these desirable circumstances in their future. Thus, they stare at their memories “in a state of desire and appetite” as if they are pleasures soon to come. I find the fact that Marcel seems to be claiming that the pleasure he gets from dwelling on the past is because he has not the ability to venture out and create his own memories to be rather irksome, because though he does have health problems, we know from his confession to us that he can in fact go out and do things.

Marcel then says that the memory “recreated out of my present self, the whole of that self, by virtue of an identical sensation, the child or youth who had first seen them.” It is this sentence that reveals of “magical” Marcel truly feels that invisible circle is. He experiences a transformation, or rather a regression to a past form of himself.

Of all the readings we have done so far this quarter my favorite is pages 253-440 of The Captive. In this section of the book, our narrator, attends the Verdurin party. A party, as it turns out, that is hosted (or taken over) by M. de Charlus. Admittedly, the narrator’s reasoning for attending the party is to find out about Albertine’s whereabouts and whether she has been with other girls. His fears are never quelled, only excited, instead though, he spends a large portion of the party creating wonderful descriptions of the characters within.

Things really get heated, though, when the guests begin to leave the party and our narrator ends up in a private conversation with M. de Charlus and Brichot. At this point, our narrator is prying for information about Albertine’s whereabouts and learns much about homosexuals of his day in France. M. de Charlus is no fool and continues to humor our narrator even though he knows our narrator is obsessed with Albertine’s whereabouts. Still, it surprised him “greatly when he [Charlus] cited among the inverts the ‘friend of the actress’ who was the leader of the little society of four friends” (396). Oh no! The four at Balbec, all of which our narrator would love… if he could have them individually.

As Charlus relates “Two are entirely for women. One of them is, but isn’t sure about his friend, and in any case they hide their doings from each other” (397). I can’t imagine this made our narrator feel any better. Now, if he continues on with his obsessive tendencies, he has to ‘protect’ Albertine from carrying on in the ‘Fab Four’ at Balbec, as it’s quite possible she could have lesbian relations with them.

Charlus, as usual, likes to flaunt his knowledge and relates to our narrator and Brichot, just how many homosexuals there are in their midst: “You yourself, Brichot, who would stake your life on the virtue of some man or other who comes to this house and whom the initiated [‘the initiated’ being one of a multitude of terms used to describe those who partake in homosexual sex] would recognise a mile away, you feel obliged to believe like everyone else what is said about someone in the public”, he goes on “As things are, the average rate of sanctity [those partaking in homosexual sex], if you see any sanctity in that sort of thing, is somewhere between three and four out of ten” (397).

This information shocks both Brichot and our narrator, though they believe him and as the narrator thinks to himself “If Brichot had transferred to the male sex the question of bad reputations, in my case, conversely, it was to the female sex that, thinking of Albertine, I applied the Baron’s words” (397). The real reason our narrator is here, is to find out the truth of what Albertine is doing. The results will, naturally, only make him more obsessive. The fact that he doesn’t come to the conclusion that it’s not within his rights nor abilities to control what another human being does, or that he should find someone who would be solely faithful to him, is beyond our narrator.

This conversation, quite smoothly leads into the revelations about Swann. As Austin explained in his close reading, the narrator wants to know all about Swann, since after Swann’s death, he was recognized as one of the great people of the narrator’s time. Unfortunately, the results are not good for our narrator or Swann. Charlus declares that he was Odette’s lover and that Odette slept with all sorts of men and ‘urged’ Charlus to put together orgies for her. The validity of Charlus’s words are apparently taken for granted by the narrator and conclude the story of Swann’s love in an sad way for Swann and in a quite different way for Odette.

Sarah Fox’s research on the nuclear west involved ten years of extensive research involving citizen narratives. The wide range of interviews that she had to conduct directly relates to my fieldwork memory project. The people in my group are studying personal narratives. I find that interviewing someone involves implementing myself in their story by researching what I don’t know. Sarah relates to many of our personal feelings about interviews. It took her a lot of courage to speak to Native Americans about the medical experiences they had during the 1950’s because of nuclear testing, as well as the implications they had with uprooting themselves because of it. I had my own qualms about interviewing my own family, let alone having to interview complete strangers like many of my classmates are. Sarah had to weave the narratives of the citizens she interviewed into her own story and that takes dedication and time. As I have continued to learn through my time at Evergreen, we all have such valuable stories to tell because they are so important to who we are individually. Sarah didn’t speak about how she got interested in nuclear testing but it’s obvious to see that she is fascinated by nuclear testings affect in the world. Like I feel about many projects I’ve started, she has an infinite amount of information she could access in the future. I plan to get her book because her information is valuable, especially to our generation. To solve the elimination of nuclear waste we need to study its beginning and its affects on our environment and people on a global scale.

In Kindred by Octavia Butler, she writes, “Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War 11 books– a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.” (Pg. 116)

Octavia makes a good point here. That ante bellum whites tortured people for over two hundred years, long before the Nazi’s. It’s hard for me to look so far back to the past. It’s important that while we look at the Germans, we take into account the entirety of our long and brutal pasts. Many people have been hurt in our long and complicated past. This story, along with the stories of those tortured by the Germans, allowed me to take a look into Japanese Internment camps and the many people that suffered. African Americans, Jewish, Dutch, are only a few of the people that have suffered in our history. As a woman of Caucasian/Indonesian decent, I have two different pasts that are associated with my heritage. The possibility that my Caucasian ancestors owned slaves contrasted by my Indonesian ancestors who spent part of their life in prison camps during WW11.

Octavia had a personal connection with her story because of her African American heritage. Our heritage is incredibly important to understand our place in the world now. Looking at the past can help us make life decisions and influence what our purpose is in the world. For myself, studying my grandma’s life has opened up a whole new side of my life. I’m not purely defined by my ancestors pasts but it helps me understand what they went through- and what I can take away from their lives that will help me form who I am as a person. I haven’t experienced racial discrimination or oppression but I have been bullied, seen loved one’s die, and doubted myself along the way.

Yes, I’ve been avoiding writing this. I’ve known I’ve needed to write this, explore this, for a few weeks. Longer, really, but it had been buried deeper. I’ve been thinking so much about this book I’m going to work on for the next year. I’ve got ideas about the topics I’m going to write on, the structure I want to use/create, the characters I’m going to need and want, and their arcs. There are so many things that go into a book, especially when you’re trying to create a new form, an experimental work.

And the most important question appears: why?

Why am I writing?

Why this story?

Why this character?

I want to say that these are impossible questions, but they aren’t. They are the reason we write. We write to explore ourselves, to make ourselves uncomfortable. I always avoid the uncomfortable. I like to think that everyone does. But now I need to lean into it.

I suppose that the main reason I am interested in this subject is because I like challenging topics. I like books that quietly, unpretentiously, grapple with compelling, scary issues.

I’ve always felt that the foster care system is simply interesting to me. It’s not something I have experienced or ever imagined I would experience. It creates stories all by itself. But interesting is not enough. It’s not enough to devote so much time and work to. There are plenty of things that are scary about the system, but what part of it makes it scary enough for me to pursue like this?

I think it has to do with family. My story keeps moving towards being more and more family-centric. I have a family. A broad family. I always have my parents to fall back on. I have grandparents and aunts and uncles who would travel halfway around the world to help me. I have cousins who I know would open their doors to me in a pinch. And I have family friends who have made it clear that their doors are open in an emergency.

These are comforting things to know. So what happens when someone doesn’t have that comfort. I know that many people don’t. I know that I am immensely lucky. And so of course I find life without that support to be terrifying.

So I take it to extremes. What if you lost that support over and over again? What if now you are losing that support to death? What happens when your world changes so drastically and you’re not very good at handling that?

I’m pretty good at handling things. I don’t know why. I guess my mom did a decent job on me. I went through my struggles pretty smoothly. Which is not to say I don’t have my issues. I’ve got plenty. But others have more.

I suppose these complicated personal issues, mental health issues, are something that interest me. It’s hard to live with, hard to have relationships with. But if everyone who has a mental health issue didn’t get to have great, healthy relationships, our species wouldn’t exist. That’s what I tell people around me all the time, because I live in a complicated relationship, like many people.

On top of my issues, like anxiety, stress, and a myriad of odd health issues, my partner has many of his own. He experiences depression, severe anxiety (far, far worse than mine), and occasional agoraphobia. Does this make life harder? Yes. But it doesn’t change that these aspects of him are part of the whole person whom I love very deeply.

I guess I want to tell this story from his side, the side of the person in the relationship who struggles more. Because I have found that I respect that position very much. To be able to fully accept that you have serious life-effecting issues takes a lot of strength. To be in a relationship is both wonderful and terrifying. On the one hand, you have support. On the other, there’s someone extremely close to you that makes you see how far from “normal” you are (even though “normal” doesn’t really exist). So yes, I believe my partners position is harder than mine. I think that, from the outside, most poeple assume that I’m in the hard spot. But I see him question all the time if he has a right to be with me.

These are the hard questions. These challenging relationships are what make me write. They are what I want to explore. They are the why.

And the answer is yes. He has every right to be with me. Because he is just as whole a human, just as valuable, just as loving, just as creative. He’s just a different human, valuable in different ways, loving in different ways, and creative in different ways. And that’s why I love him. His perspective makes me think. He pushes me to question more. He pushes me to challenge myself. He pushes me to write. He pushes me to love. He pushes me to be uncomfortable.

Terra Heatherly-Norton

5/13/15

“Suffering the prolongation of a spiritual shock that has come from without, keeps aspiring to change its form; one hopes to be able to dispel it by making plans, by seeking information, one wants it to pass through its countless metamorphoses, for this requires less courage than keeping our suffering intact.”      -Pg 578  The Captive & the Fugitive

In this part of the book Marcel is coming to terms with the fact that he has been left by Albertine, he observes the fact that it must have been premeditated because she took wrapping paper from his bedroom the night before. He is faced with an overwhelming amount of factual evidence that their  demise was inevitable.

“…from the day when she had ceased to kiss me, she had gone about as though tormented by a devil, stiffly erect, unbending, saying the simplest things in a mournful voice, slow in her movements, never smiling.” -Pg 574

She had shunned him weeks before she had left, Proust is reflecting on this memory as the pivotal moment Albertine decided she was going to leave him. He was conscious of it yet Proust’s ego was to large to show anything but indifference to her extreme unhappiness. To suffer is a universal concept Proust describes it so eloquently as a “spiritual shock” it leaves the unmistakable impression of a deep pain, Proust is experiencing rejection in its purest form. His wife, the woman while he did not treat her well, he hypothetically loved, the one who new him the best; took in all he had to offer her and packed her stuff up creeped out before he woke up and possibly never comes back? ( I haven’t gotten that far yet.)

Proust basically names off common things people with depression do to try and cope/cure it, seek information, make plans for the future, occupy your time. But he thinks that that is weak and it “requires courage” to keep ones “suffering intact.” This I interpreted as Proust justifying ways to wallow in his own self pity. But he is also pressuring himself to keep a cool exterior and remain to seem unaffected by Albertines sudden departure although he literally describes feeling like he’s dying inside.

My favorite part of this passage is how Proust describes the process of grief as “to pass through its countless metamorphoses.” I took this as Proust describing not only describing the stages of grief but also the way humans transfer their suffering from one thing to another; eternally miserable but justifying their misery in different ways as time goes by. It changes from one thing to another like the absence of his wife to the absence of his mothers goodnight kiss. He is stuck in his own whirl pool of misery and can not escape.