Rushing to and fro

So I haven't had much time to actually sit down and read Nabokov's memoir this past week. It's been on my to-do list of course.... along with a million other things that need attending to! I feel as if this week has leveled me completely. I'm sick (with strep), fatigued, and incredibly sour at the dismal weather (will winter come already and dispel all this horrid humidity)?

I shouldn't be using this journal entry as a font for all my myriad complaints. I should be writing insightful, impressive words about memory and Nabokov and human consciousness. But that would require actual thinking. And now, with my first college midterm looming precipitously over my head and an ungodly amount of Chinese homework lying fallow in my backpack I can't bring myself to remember or speculate on anything besides my next meal and the overall crapiness of this week.

I will say though, from the little pieces of his work I've actually had time to read, Nabokov seems to be right up my alley. He writes in a very exacting, eloquent fashion. I like to mull over his words, rubbing them together like sticks and stones in my mind, feeling the sparks singing my synapses as I make believe that I too could be a Russian aristocrat with an incredible talent for description and an elegant estate called Vrya to call home.

Why do writers have such cool lives?

On a slightly related not, the very first chapter of this memoir were familiar to me. As in I have read (and analyzed) those exact same words before on a SAT practice test I took once.

Prompt #2

King Philip Came Over From Germany Sunday.

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

My seventh grade life sciences teacher employed this mnemonic device to help us remember the hierarchy of taxonomic organization. Or at least I think it was her. Maybe it was Mrs. Brodman, my eighth grade science teacher, or even Mrs. Krouse my freshman Honors Biology teacher who taught me these words. To be honest, I can't remember exactly when this little phrase was insinuated into my mind and I certainly have no recollection of what compelled it to lodge so stubbornly in my mind.

Later on in high school I would learn that there was even a higher level of classification beyond Kingdom. Apparently there were three "Domains" that encompassed all life. I promptly amended the mnemonic in my head to Dead King Philip Came Over.... and so on. Now that I'm a freshman in college, I'm learning in my OEB class that these classifications are ostensibly useless. They were just good ol' Linnaeus's arbitrary way of arbitrarily ascribing order to life. Real Biological classification is all relative. It's messy, convoluted, impossible to section off into he efficient lines of a mnemonic device.

Yet I'm sure that the mnemonic (now useless) will persist in my memory, another shard of another time that I'm averse to lose. And in a way it'll still help me. It carries with it the spun memories of an era of biology coursework in my life--the textbooks with their leafy green covers and waxy pages, the pill bugs cowering at the bottom of the jar, gel electrophoresis trays and color coded heart diagrams. Ironically enough, the mnemonic has no relevance to these memories, but it's lumped in with the rest of my biology memories. It's true that I can't pin down any discrete moment that it's been of use to me on a test or in lab but it endures, and I warrant there must be a reason for this, a explanation for why I've come to be acquainted with Dumb King Philip. 

Maybe the mnemonic endures by virtue of its construction. The words may have some pattern or veiled connotation, some variable that makes them unpalatable to forgetfulness. I think that a more plausible guess would be the context in which I was exposed to the words. I was young, impressionable, in love with biology. All the creepy crawly things that repulsed my sister so much enthralled me. So what I learned, I retained, weaving the framework for a latent interest, adding color and meaning to my biological know-how. And that framework still remains, frozen in time... resurrected with the recitation of those words. My natural interest and curiosity made my mind susceptible to memory, opening it up to grab on to all that it could encompass. There's a reason why I can't seem to remember what mnemonic I was taught for the planets of the solar system. Frankly, I have no interest in stars or planetary nebula. Just like I have no interest in the Spanish Language or Electrical Engineering. So when I learn such things, I never ever seem to remember them.

The Reeling

I went out last night, like I do every Friday night (and most Saturday's and the occasional Thursday). I went out to a club named Machine, washed the black marks of my hands, danced up on stage, swayed and pulsed and careened to the music.

And as I moved there was an image coming to focus in my mind. It throbbed with the music and suddenly I knew where I was: The Carousel, another Friday night, dancing with men I didn't know and searching the crowd for a hungry, empty face. My friends hemmed me in then; they kept me safe and chaste. But I knew no one here. I had come with a group of kids but I trusted none of them. We had no background, no history, no collective memory to draw upon. I've known some of them a month at most.

Why was I here? Was I simply trying to relive the past? I should be beyond this I thought. This is not who I am anymore, not who I want to be. But it was Friday night and I had gone out and there was nothing more to it.

I got home alright--taxi fair was five bucks a piece--to my dorm where my roommates were just hanging out, talking about girls and philosophy and socialism. I got home alright to my bed with the comforter already mussed and the faint whiff of sticky floorboards. I got home alright when my eyes slid shut and Tennessee rose up to cradle me.

My old friends from home are all together this weekend. But I went to far afield to return. Sometimes I wonder....

Was it really worth it?

Final Paper Musings

Before all these deadlines start to blur together in my head, I just wanna take sometime to brain storm ideas for my final paper.

Idea #1: I want to do something related to the memoir writing process, how it relates to other styles of writing. In order to accomplish this, I was thinking I could take a shot at writing an abridged memoir commemorating a certain period of my life (most likely this past summer) and complementing it with analytical pieces that dissect each memory and sorta explain my writing process as I wrote down these memories.

Idea #2: I've kept a bunch of journals throughout my middle school and high school career. I'd love to write a piece analyzing what significance these often poorly written recollections of my life really have. The paper will combine snippets from my journals paired with analysis and reflection on how my journals present memory. Also I'd think it'd be cool to track the steady progression in how i approach my experiences, to show how writing a diary somehow maps a person's growth as a human being. The logistics of this idea may be problematic since it would involve my parents shipping me my stacks of journals from back home somehow.

Idea #3: I was really inspired by "The Madeleine Episode" in Swann's Way, this notion that inanimate objects can sometimes retain ghostly lives and memories of their own.... I can relate to this in a certain way as well. Several objects in my life have powerful memories attached to them. I keep most of this stuff underneath my bed and like to sift through it all at times. So I think it would be cool to write a sort of disjointed memoir composed of short vignettes each inspired by a different keepsake of mine.

Prompt #1

Before reading A Moveable Feast, I had read only one book by Hemingway. That book was A Farewell to Arms which I read almost exactly one year ago for my AP Literature Course in high school. So going into this most recent foray into Hemingway, I knew a few basic facts about his life and work.

I knew Hemingway was a member of the so-called "Lost Generation" which lived and wrote in Paris in the aftermath of World War One. I knew that he committed suicide by putting the barrel of a gun in his mouth, that he had worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during the Great War and that he had multiple marriages to different women. Furthermore, I knew him as a lauded writer who wrote terse, somewhat blunt prose that matched his forcibly male persona.

Now, after reading his memoir, I find that many of my preconceptions of Hemingway have been affirmed. He certainly was a self-described man's man, the kind of guy who tries to teach his friend's boxing, drinks and gambles with equal gusto and indulges in fine food and pretty young women.  The way he interacted with other writers of "The Generation Perdue" was fascinating--from his homophobic disgust for Gertrude Stein to his sudden friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Similarly intriguing was the insight A Moveable Feast provided into Hemingway's internal relationship with his own writing. The book certainly made me respect Hemingway for the methodical, thoughtful approach he took to his writing, how very seriously he took it. At one point he mentions spending entire mornings just writing one paragraph of a story! However, overall, it did not change my view of Hemingway as a person and historical figure. He was just as blunt and virile as I had assumed he would be... there was certainly a powerful, calculating mind behind his stern countenance, but that revelation came as no real surprise either.

Regardless, Hemingway still possesses the commendable ability to put me to sleep with his writing. (or maybe I should just get more sleep?)

One Percent

I remember you, so clearly. How you knew, without a doubt, what coursed and lived in my head.

In summer it was so simple. I could get in a car and forget I existed for the day. I could be just a drifting dot of shiny black hair, barely breaking the surface of the neighborhood pool and you would float blithely with me. It wasn't hard to imagine that our lives would remain this way, unbroken lines twining around in hopeless loops, as tangled and sedentary as the unused hose in the back yard, hidden as it was in a bed of overgrown weeds. Yet the facts of our lives cascaded down in increments and I knew (just as you did) that the lines were diverging, fracturing by the stop sign on your street I've blown by a hundred times-uncaring, undaunted, daft.

We both moved away. I'm here in Boston, working as best as I can and fingering all these memories shored up in my head of us, the slow, gradual way in which I came to be your friend and the fast, heady rush of our epic final year.

I wonder what's changed, in these months, in the months still to come. I wonder a lot about these things. I think ahead to coming home, to how ordinary and bucolic Tennessee will feel to me now that I've been here, in Boston's coruscating fringe. 

So what if my life isn't grand? If there's anything that reading all these memoirs has taught me it's this: No lives are. You can be Earnest freaking Hemingway and still have a boring life 99% of the time.

It's that 1% though that you live for, that you keep coming back too when the desultory, the mundane, engulfs you. It's that 1% that you look back on without aid from photo albums or Facebook threads, because that image you have in your head defies all physical remnants of that sort.

I'll keep looking I guess, waiting for my life be worthy of  remembering... holding out for that one percent chance.

Passing By

I was walking to Thayer dorms this morning, to meet a friend for lunch and get some laundry done, perhaps write a bit as well.

Little things started to strike me: the queer, rosy tint my sunglasses lent the world, the surprising lack of tourists as I passed by the John Harvard statue, the yellow caution tape spanning the distance between Thayer's South Side and University Hall, the police cars parked in the yard.

"Someone committed suicide on the top step of Memorial Church" Joseph would tell me later. I would nod, and root about inside for something to feel, and come up only with the empty consolation that today was and is still a beautiful day and that later I will exercise and sit in my room talking about the depravity of suicide with my roommates and we would all turn comfortably over in our young lives and feel normalcy hem us in on all sides once more.

There's someone dead on the steps of memorial church. One friend saw his body; another saw the head. And I'm wondering why no one (not me or you or the tourists) seems to care.

"SOMEONE SHOT THEMSELVES ON TOP OF MEMORIAL CHURCH STEPS!!" one friend texts me after I already know.

"I know, It's terrible. Michael saw the body" I type back.

My phone buzzes and I slide it open. Another text from the same friend: "Let's do our laundry at twelve thirty. Meet in Thayer Basement?"

"Sure. See you then."

I go back outside because I've forgotten my detergent in my dorm room. Ducking under the caution tape, I go on my way. 

Fast Forward One Year

I've been slowly getting into A Moveable Feast over the past few days. I'll read it in snatches--in my room after completing my Chinese homework, or sitting on the windswept steps of Widener Library in between class. This time last year I was reading Hemingway as well. A Farewell to Arms was one of our assigned readings for AP Literature, and I remember quite vividly sitting in a cubicle in the lab where I worked, furtively reading about World War One ambulance drivers and their beloved nurses when I was supposed to be analyzing the molecular structure of Chemical compounds using complicated computer software I had no interest in tangling with. It wasn't my favorite book. Hemingway's style, the detached, unadorned syntax and the methodical rhythm to his words isn't really my thing. His writing floats serenely in and out of my head, leaving no trace besides a few scattered facts and a general sense of huuuunh? The writing's not complicated, and maybe that's my hang up with Hemingway. Whenever I read his writing, I never feel compelled to understand, to delve deeper into his psyche and discover what drives him as a writer and a thinker.

It's weird, how reminiscent his memoir is to his fiction. The writing feels just as detached, and I can almost no believe that this is Hemingway actually writing about his own life. The book does pique my interest in how it describes the competitive, arcane world of the "Generation Perdue"... giving insight into not only Hemingway's life but also the lives of Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald, contemporaries of Hemingway who were incredibly influential in his work.

I don't know; I just don't like Hemingway.

Autumn, Now

It's beginning to feel like fall outside.

While sitting with a book in the yard, I saw an intrepid (and chubby) squirrel industriously burying acorns today. It looked at me challengingly with its beady little eyes, as if daring me to stand up and watch it scamper deftly away, onwards to the next acorn cache. Ever the pacifist, I just sat, letting my open book fall into my lap, enjoying the midday sun and the sibilant whisper of wind amidst the oak leaves.

Moments like this remind me poignantly of home, how I could track the procession from summer into autumn from my bedroom window, the trees in my back yard growing riotous with color and then all at once barren. My memories correlate with the season. Autumn is always school and friends, the onerous coursework, cross country meets every Saturday, the mismatched layers of nubby knits mom would pile on before work each day. These are the images flitting about my head in these pre-autumnal days. Looking forward, it's strange and not a little bit disconcerting to think that that life, that distilled essence of Tennessee in fall, is lost to me now (for the next four years at least). My autumns will now be exclusively spent here, in Cambridge, sitting by imperious squirrels in Harvard yard, running in the rain to Lamont, eating Americanized Chinese food and pushing through milling crowds of tourists who don't know my name but figure I'm a Harvard student.

As we discussed in class, in reference to A Mountain of Crumbs, it's hard--to leave home that is. I look out my new bedroom window and see the redbrick of Strauss dorm and Mass Ave beyond it instead of four stately elms and my mother's vegetable patch.

What happens now I wonder? When will my recollections of Harvard blend into that lovely quagmire in my memory I flavor with lethal doses of nostalgia? Or will the two realms: Tennessee and Cambridge, forever stand alone in my consciousness, two surprisingly distinct phases in my cluttered life.

 Regardless, I say hello and good day to you autumn , my friend. To quote my favorite Keats poem, you have always been a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." 

Memories like Crumbs

Today's seminar class was devoted to discussing A Mountain of Crumbs, the memoir of Elena Gorchova that we all just finished reading. I was glad to discover that opening up my experience of the work to the forum of our in-class discussion gave me an enhanced insight into the books events and themes.

I was particularly struck by our group analysis of the book's title. We postulated many possible reasons as to why A Mountain of Crumbs, one being that Mrs. Gorchova was trying to reflect one of the memoir's central themes: subterfuge both in the Soviet government and in personal matters (vranyo). Additionally, we wondered if perhaps the title was implying this notion of subsisting on a framework of self-deception, inducing happiness even when times are harsh. My favorite interpretation however was that the title was simply a metaphor for life, that Elena Gorchova essentially was saying that her life, that all lives, are merely mountains of remembered crumbs. I felt that this image, though somewhat disheartening, was beautiful in how it rendered not some idealized, romantic image of life, but rather life as it really is, brutal and bucolic and abrupt.

We flitted through many more disparate topics as our discussion evolved, touching on 9/11, Russian history, how it feels to leave home and so on. When four pm came and I found myself packing up my cream, drawstring back pack, there was this buzzing sensation in my head, of ideas stirring to the fore, eddying in riotous vortexes in my mind.

It was quite the feeling.

Copious and Clear

Out hereabouts, in the Vermont woods, I feel a tad ridiculous. Sweat (and rain) soaked layers of synthetic fabric cling to my hot, sticky skin, but it's cold this morning on the trail. Tendrils of floating vapor twine with the branch-scape above, soaring up into the wizened canopy of the forest. Our progress wends ever downwards. We slog through sucking pools of shiny black mud. We creep down slippery rock faces, our fingertips tracing the craggy disposition of the mountain. Three successive days of rain have fallen, and the Green Mountains are saturated. The excess water travels down with us, leaking from the porous soil, turning our path into a snaking, sloping waterfall.

It's the last day of our five day hike, and we are searching for a dry, flat spot to set up camp so we can spend our last night away from the front country and its highways lined with lights, its showers and ivory toilet bowls and wonderfully ordinary technology.

Lost in my own thoughts, I keep my eyes trained downwards, searching out a path for my mud-caked hiking boots to tread. I'm ignoring the spectacle of our descent, how we all must appear--a bedraggled train of Harvard students, carrying teetering packs on our backs, a swath of human chatter in the primordial wilderness. The mountains make me feel tiny, but it's a welcome feeling, this anonymity. Out here, I'm invisible, and no one is here to poke and prod, to demand my action, to draw out of me some shrewd and erudite retort to the world's clamoring requests. I'm solitary, but not alone. My fellow FOPers inhabit this memory with me. They populate this recollection with laughter, shared pasta, the powerful camaraderie of hauling lumber together up a mountain slope. I speak with them in short bursts, divulging little chunks of my past and receiving similar slivers of their lives in return. This exchange is simple and honest and I put little effort into establishing anything enduring.

The truth is I came out here for myself. I signed up for this trip not to meet people or test myself physically. No, I just wanted to get away, to distance myself in the most drastic way possible from the suburban, cloistered clutches of Tennessee. Out here, in the verdant Vermont back country, I had grieved at each quiet trailhead, each starlit campsite. The natural beauty all around me was like a shot of morphine, numbing the shock of leaving home, helping me cope with all the floating faces of friends I left behind in the airport terminal thirty minutes from my house, whose limp waving hands could not say enough to quell my sense of disaster.

I emerged from the bread loaf wilderness with my FOP mates, covered in mysteriously earned scratches and a glossy patina of sebum. We stopped for lunch by the Clark Brook, and I watched the water as it flowed, so clear and copious.

Little Scars

Memories can be volatile, surfacing in effervescent bursts in my head, charging forth from brief encounters, telltale sounds, and that exotic potpourri of scents I can't describe nor forget.

They alight upon my mind at the oddest moments, causing me to pause before the obligatory mental shrug, the return to the ever-pressing present.

I was brushing my teeth the other day when my eye settled on the abused green and white tube of toothpaste I've been using all summer. Something about my toothpaste, perhaps its placement on the sink edge or the way the cap was only screwed on halfway, caused a memory to abruptly erupt in my consciousness. Flung back in time, I reappeared in the heady heat of Wenzhou in summer. The tube of toothpaste--Crest Spearmint Extreme Clean--sat on a crowded counter top, between the metal basin of the sink and a rack of chopsticks, caked with tonight's dinner. I was brushing my teeth as I did every night, clad only in my underwear, my ye ye (grandfather) and nai nai (grandmother) asleep in the living room of their two room apartment. Outside the kitchenette's sliver of a window, I could see the dark shades of drying clothes hanging limply on crisscrossing clotheslines. Murmured strings of conversation, spoken in the indecipherable "Wenzhou hua", cut through the stifling night and I felt quite sharply the dizzying vertigo of being far from home and alone in my head.

The memory is more a singular image than a story in movable color and sound. It's me, brushing my teeth, in blue-gray boxer briefs and nothing else, the slump of my shoulders articulating the desolation of my last childhood summer. It's not a particularly bad memory. I loved my trip to China this summer. It gave me solitude, a certain peace of mind. Yet it's not a joyous tableau either. It's simply a memory, a piece of my past that happens to appear when I look at that crumpled tube of toothpaste and allow myself to remember.

Speculating

I'm not exactly sure what it is I should be writing here. The premise of this project is the analysis of memoirs and the memories that compose them. Yet this in itself is not a particularly expansive topic. It's difficult to write about memories. They're complex, multifaceted, obscured by a haze of subjectivity. When you write about memories, you run a treacherous gamut of emotional and logical issues. It's only too easy to fall into the hackneyed recitation of past events. Indeed, anyone can relate a memory; we all do it everyday when we talk to our friends or banter with family. But it takes more effort to distill something meaningful from memories, along with a a lot of candor and instinct. So maybe that's what this journal/blog is about? Extracting from memories something powerful and original to be articulated in the forum of class discussion and personal writings.

I don't know. I'm just speculating.

Anyhow, I've been thinking about my own memories, about the moments that have lodged most stubbornly in my mind. As I string them together in my mind, I'm beginning to see the beginnings of my own memoir, my own body of life. There's stories I could tell, memories to be related. I'm not sure if they're any good. Many of them are not certainly, but it's interesting, at least to me, to think of how my life would appear in memoir form. I feel that memoirs can seem pretentious sometimes, as if the memoir writer is extolling some special quality to his own life, raising it to some higher plane perhaps. One could even go further and say writing a memoir is the ultimate form of self flattery. Yet the fact remains that we all have stories to be told, and the best memoirs in my opinion are not defined by extreme, nigh on unbelievable circumstances or tremendous feats of heroism; the best memoirs dredge the depths of mediocrity, lending lyrical beauty to the trappings of ordinary life.

Water Under the Bridge

You always hear the maxim "Remember the Present." It's an entreaty to all of us to enjoy life as it occurs, rather than being mired in past occurrences or the overzealous pursuit of the future. I guess the sentiment is nice, this notion that life should be enjoyed in an immediate, spontaneous manner, that we should dwell on this earth independent of the expansive time lines continuously unraveling in our minds. But there's something scary about giving oneself over to the present. For people such as myself, who are dominated by a profound sense of personal history, the present will forever exist receding into the past, like so much flotsam drifting out to sea.

I am the kind of person who finds succor in nostalgia. I even wrote my Common Application Essay for college as a reflective inventory of dusty, old keepsakes I stow away beneath my bed back home. As I go about my daily life, I assess the quality of my experiences in the context of my past. The frozen yogurt I enthusiastically ingested today at lunch is pitted against the memory of waffle cone Wednesdays my junior year of high school and the kitschy delight of splitting a parfait with an old crush after a track meet. I walk along Harvard's shady pathways and images from my past cluster at the edge of my consciousness. Crossing under Annenberg's triumphant flying buttresses, I see Princeton's venerable chapel with its vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows, and as I run along the Charles River I'm reminded of a similar run two years ago, along the swampy edges of Stanford's Lake Lagunita.

My past makes me question the present. I track in my mind the ghostly progression of lives that could have been mine, veins of experience that will now never be plumbed. The past makes me doubt, makes me wonder at my circumstances, makes me quibble over trivialities of place and time. Sometimes I feel like all I am is a moving memory. After all, how I perceive the present is largely based on how memorable I feel it to be. I'm always asking this question of myself: Will I remember this? Will this matter to me in a year, a decade, a lifetime?

This isn't to say that I don't enjoy my life. On the contrary, I tackle each new day with a fierce tenacity, and I try not to live in the past; even though sometimes I fail. In my mind, the present is enriched by the past. It's an indirect process, but it happens, and my life is certainly the better for it.

Just yesterday I was standing on a bridge over the Charles, looking impassively down at the water below. It was a moment of smiles and laughter and ballsy bravado. My world felt open and new. I stood there, perched just so, with some new Harvard friends at my back and Boston thrumming all about me. My present condition was very apparent to me. Yet all the colliding sights and sounds could not crowd out my past. Memory laced the air I breathed as I jumped. Memory fleshed out my particular sensation of weightlessness, the sense of impending impact with the water. And memory articulated the refreshing chill of the water--how the river eddied and undulated as I swam back towards shore.

I walked away from the bridge knowing I had made another memory, whose relative importance to my life story would reveal itself as time passed and the present evaporated into a mist of remembrance.

Beginnings

What is a memory?

The question seems so inane. Memories are simply what they are: discrete parcels of human experience that form the chronological framework of our lives. There's nothing more to it really.

Or is there?

The other day in my freshman seminar (Memoirs and Memories), I was forced to actually delve into the deceptively simple matter of what constitutes a memory and why should anyone care. My five classmates and I found ourselves arrayed about a table, engaging in a disjointed yet earnest discourse on the nature of memoirs, diaries and their like. Our somewhat abstracted objective was to understand the unique place of memoirs in both literature and history, and our dialogue on the matter spanned topics as disparate as the validity of artistic license in memoir writing and our own personal recollections of the 9/11 world trade center bombings. As we sat there talking, tense with the nervous energy of our first day of college courses, I began to discern certain unifying threads in our discussion, tell tale hints as to what directions our study of memoirs may veer.

What I sensed was as follows:

A) Memories, as intangible constructs of the mind, are incredibly hard to quantify. They seem to be more about randomness and fleeting imagery than anything empirical or logic-driven.

B) Memoirs as opposed to autobiographies are driven by vivid, emotive forces. The rich description of an event and its emotional impact trumps any notion of narrative or structure.

C) Memoirs lend history a color and depth that is lacking in a simple recitation of facts.

As class progresses, I'm sure my interpretation of memories (both mine own and those of others) will continue to burgeon and evolve. This after all, is just a beginning.