Journal Prompt #5

Besides a brief and terrible dalliance with the piano when I was younger, I've only ever been a listener of music --and not a particularly good one at that. I've been told on numerous occasions that I am "the most tone deaf person I know." It's nothing I'm embarrassed of; I came to the conclusion long ago that music was not my forte and never would be just like art or physical activity doesn't gel with some people.

That is not to say that I don't like music. Like most people, I enjoy music. When I run, I listen to poppy 90's hits and angry chick rock; Most Friday nights you can find me dancing somewhere or another to the current club mixes and Top 40 hits: Katy Perry and Akon and Cascada. If you want to make me feel  wistful for my all but lost childhood just hum to me any song from Aladdin or Mulan and I guarantee I'll join you enthusiastically in song, albeit in an off key manner.

Music is inescapable in our daily lives. Only when I sleep can I arguably say that music is truly silenced. And who knows, perhaps records spin on repeat in my slumbering mind unbeknownst to me. This is a ubiquity that I am sadly reminded of every time I am in my room attempting to study, only to have my focus broken by the Hebrew hymns my Jewish roommate loves to play. So I guess my relationship with music is that I find it unapproachable in the sense that its curlicue notes and esoteric motifs are utterly beyond my ken, and yet by virtue of its omnipresence in my life, it's an alien entity I've learned to coexist with.

If I were asked to articulate just how exactly music permeates my life, I think I would refer mostly to its strange properties of memory. Songs can be repositories or at least aids to a person's memory. Many of my memories concerning family road trips I took when I was younger have snippets of songs playing in the backdrop. When I listen to Copeland's cover of "Every Breath You Take" by the police, the visceral tremor of each lyric, how the phrase "oh can't you see, that you belong to me..." draws out in haunting fermata in my mind, plays back to me a memory slide show of the Grand Tetons all snow capped and jagged rising up out of the Wyoming flatness. My impression of that moment, the desolation I perceived from the car window as the world slid by so smoothly outside blends into my feelings about the song. They exist intertwined in my consciousness and I don't think I could nor want to dissociate the two. The music enriches my memory and vice versa, and now whenever I think about great swaths of gray plain or the crenelated spine of the Rockies, I think also about Copeland and the Police and how it felt to be in a car, listening to my brother's Ipod nano as he snored in the seat beside me.

Experiences like this pepper any life. There's one snippet of "Kids" by MGMT that I will always associate with the laundry room raves my friends and I would have the summer I spent at Governor's School in the sun baked ghost town of Martin, West Tennessee. Play "Daylight" by Matt and Kim for me and not only will I smile, but my eyes will get that detached, glassy look and you know that I will be thinking of Andrew, and how we would drive around town aimlessly to that song on nights we didn't feel like doing homework, just talking about school and life. Then there's "Recessional" by Vienna Teng, which I hear sidling through my mind every time I see snow because it was the song I was listening to that time I was walking Airik in the woods near my house and before I knew it, the first and only snow of that year was falling in soft white waves onto my face.

The thing is, most of these memories I feel like are more about the images and the tactile sensations then the music. "Every Breath You Take" is an important addendum to my memory of that car drive from Colorado to Yellowstone, but what I remember even more vividly is the visual impact of the Mountains materializing in the distance and the cool compress of glass against my forehead as I stared at their approach, utterly transfixed. So in a way, music seems to be only tangentially related to my memories; the soundtrack of my life has no inherent value of its own beyond the fact that it allows me to conjure up my memory of a moment more readily.

If there's one memory, or perhaps almost-memory, of mine in which music is an integral part of the recollection rather than just a framing device, it would be my memory of an event that occurred in my life on Friday the 13th my freshman year of high school. Sometimes a song has such eerie symbolism within a memory that it's hard to dismiss as a instance of chance. The song in question here is "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol and the instance I'm remembering is a car crash that nearly took my life. My memory of the crash itself is spotty at best, my mind has blocked out much of what happened. I remember no crunching metal or the flash of car lights. I can't envision in my head the moment of impact, the instance where my face slammed into the head rest in front of me, the bloody intrusion of my teeth into my lower nasal cavity. These things all happened, and yet I don't remember how or when. What I do remember with almost vicious clarity is the sound of the radio playing right before Jesse's mom slammed on the brakes. I was singing along, my mouth luxuriantly open, eyes half-closed.

"If I lay here... If I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world."

And then nothing. 

Left Behind

I wish now that I had brought my journals with me to college. There's seven plus years of my life stored away in those cheaply bound, messily smudged pages, seven years that I was willing to leave behind back in August when I began to pack for Harvard. I packed in in spurts essentially: loading and unloading my two suitcases with clothes and pictures and random trinkets, letting myself get more and more flustered as I tried to decide what parts of my Tennessee life were necessary to bring with me to the far-off northern mecca that was Boston.

I ended up making a lot of poor packing choices, bringing hot sauce and plates but no utensils, stuffing the sides of my suitcases with colorful socks but neglecting to bring any long underwear... my thought processes were jumbled, I wasn't quite there in the packing process I guess, lost as I was in the last sweet days of summer. When it came time to decide whether I wanted to bring all my journals with me I decided against it. I reasoned that I was making this grand leap forward in my life and education, and to bring my journals was to dwell foolishly in the past. I would be strong and unsentimental and just leave them behind. It was a moment of closure in a way, physical proof of the benchmark I wanted to cleave into my life at this time.

But now.... ten weeks into my Harvard experience, I feel slightly foolish. I've come to realize that there's a difference between moving on and giving up your past. The two actions aren't mutually exclusive. Indeed, as we've been discussing in class, manifestations of our past color our present and future whether we wish them too or not; memory and self are inextricably tied. I can leave my journals behind, but memory still shadows my thoughts and actions, patiently, assiduously.

What I left behind at home then is a physical evocation of my nostalgia. My journals serve as tool to organize years and years of built up sensation; in a sense, they bring a tenuous order to my unruly thoughts as they progress through time, imposing words and enumerations and dates upon the fractal images that haunt my mind. There's a dynamic tension there as well, a sense of time (the dates, the seasonal shifts in tone, the disconnected plot of mundane moments) that is beautiful to me, reminding me that this is where I come from, that my perception lies at the crux of all these movable pieces of time and that my memory is what drives this narrative forward.

I miss the sensation of leafing through an old journal, the sense of wonder you get when you read something you penned so long ago you feel detached from the voice behind those words, and then you know that the intervening time has changed you, that each moment in between has knocked you slightly off course, led you down a thousand side paths and brought you here, where the present feels so real and the past like a sepia-toned dream.

I miss that tactility I guess, how I could use old entries as a jumping-off point for my nostalgic reflections, how when I read my thoughts from say March 25th 2007 I could almost still remember the feeling of writing those words, what emotions were thronging the spaces of my mind, my physical condition, the state of my spirit--all these things that I otherwise probably would've lost.

Without my journals, I feel like I'm just groping in the dark.

Dear myself, 54 years older

By the time my fiftieth Harvard Reunion rolls around I'll be 72. I'll be grumpy, arthritic and most likely senile. I'll be old, actually really really old. Isn't that a revelation?

What will half a century of life have meant to me? I can't really imagine myself as old. I can't imagine myself without youthful acne and a head full of hair. It's outside of my ken, beyond the expansive scope of my imagination.

So instead of speculating on what old me would want to know about young me (because by then the two will be distant cousins, hazy in each others minds) I will focus my energies on the now, on the daily passage of life and all the things I want to salvage, to store away indefinitely in some vault up in the sky so that they will never fade.

If I were given a time capsule and told to fill it with my freshman year first semester I'd fill it up with pictures and trinkets and spent charlie cards to Wonderland and Davis Square. There would be meal receipts from the Kong (crumpled and smeared with duck sauce), retail receipts from Urban Outfitters and H&M (guiltily stowed in my wallet), a Harvard ID lost in Rhode Island, Chinese language dialogues and empty solo cups. There would be a hand full of dessicated leaves, their color long faded away, reminders of an autumn long passed. There would be squash from Annenberg and bowlfuls of cereal, lived in gray sweats and a pair of dirt caked hiking boots. There would be pictures of me jumping off the foot bridge into the Charles and others of me on my precarious balcony overlooking the yard. There would be books stacked on top of books and a sheaf of paper scrawled in two different languages.

My time capsule would most likely be unintelligible to you or Lynelle or Michael or anyone else I've come to know over these past few months. We may share this campus, this view of autumn in Boston; our experiences may even intersect tentatively at times, crossing paths like polite strangers on the T, a nod of acknowledgment, a conspiratory grin telegraphed among friends, but the narration of our experiences is categorically different. And the memories that protrude most in our minds are certainly all not one in the same. But there is a continuity there. I know that there are people here who have shared my life just as I have shared theirs. Though our exact memories of this fall may diverge, we share a basis of sorts, a collective memory that enlivens our conversations and makes us feel safe, included, known.

How this will all translate into my motley compilation of keepsakes is unknown.

In this treasure trove of memories I could perhaps discern some trace of the feckless youth I maybe once was. In retrospect I might smile with chagrin, or humor, or with a bitter note of sadness. Or I may furrow my brow wonderingly and marvel at how very much the mind lets slip as the years progress.

Night Jaunts

It's blurring. In my head, all these walking dreams, these moments of vulnerability in which the outside world seeps in and I hesitate on the threshold of something new.

There's so much I should be working on, so many memories to archive, faces to connect with names and half-remembered scenes, facebook wall posts I've left un-liked, erstwhile songs spewing forth from my mouth in the deep cold of night.

Last night was a good night, a wondrous, spinning affair.

But now it's Saturday and reality is bustling all about me.

Lamont. Writing. Homework.

I'll take nocturnal memories over sunlit ones anytime.

Pictures in a Gallery

There's an image crowding out the blackness on my computer's desktop. It was taken this summer in Tennessee, on a floating dock at sunset. In it, the arcing silhouette of a boy is caught in mid-flight as he dives off the dock into the lake water below. His body is all long lines and sun-burnished skin, arms stretching outwards in imprecation to meet the reflection of the sun where it lies, a molten procession of ripples in the silken lake water. The moment sits poised beautifully between land and water, day and night; it's laced with the potent expectation of impact, the clarifying moment when the boy's body hits the water and life goes on the way it always has, its picturesqueness dissipated as quickly as it formed.

Life in its sobering reality never really lives up to photographs like this. The lake water is probably heavy with silt, and the boy's dive was probably a fluke, a spasm of athletic prowess produced by merit of a hundred graceless swan dives. But it doesn't matter, the picture stands as proof, and every time I look at it a vivid recollection of summer blazes to life in my head. Because the boy in the picture is me. That is me diving off a friend's dock into a lake thirty minutes from my house. That is my summer's penultimate sunset, gliding serenely to its mooring in the west. And that is my memory, floating just below the present in my mind, caught in mid-motion, poised just so for the camera.

I've been discussing ideas about how memory becomes fixed in the mind, how it drifts in and out of one's life at the oddest intervals. I'm drawn to this idea about how the mind connects visually and spatially to memory, how our memories can be stored, ghostly but intense, like pictures hanging in a gallery (however cliched that metaphor may seem). Reflecting on my life is like sifting through a deconstructed photo album, filled with pictures that talk and smell and cavort wonderfully through dappled sunlight and along dusty, Southern paths. It's bracing to look back on, and I spend a lot of time perfecting my vision, improving the way I meet and know my past selves.

The rub herein is that it's never quite full, this gallery of mine. There's blankness interspersed throughout, hazy areas where gray matter writhes with discontent. And then there are new canvases being hung up each day, new exhibitions that change the layout, the lighting, the panorama of my gallery. My gallery is conceived in a pastiche of regional and cultural influences, the architecture of Chinese tenements and Gothic Cathedrals, bluesy, folksy tunes and the colors of New England in fall. All of this is merely context though, the staging for each vision of my past.

Today was quite possibly the most idyllic day yet that I've encountered here at Harvard. It was sunny and warm again after a few weeks of steadily falling temperatures but windy, so you still know it's fall. Walking across the old yard, I was caught in a yellow storm of leaves. Everything was in motion. Multi-hued rain fell from the sky and whirling dervishes danced like impetuous children along the sidewalks. The moment felt surreal, a picture for a postcard maybe--"Come visit Harvard in Fall!" I paused for a second as I walked, not wanting to look like a awe struck tourist but not wishing to relinquish the wonder of the moment either. Later, after lunch, I laid out by the fountain near the Center for European Studies, let my hand fall indolently into the clear, cold water, and thought about how I would remember this moment, how and why I would paint this picture.

It'll hang one day I think, off in a corner of the gallery with a skein of dust motes obscuring its incandescent, vermilion glow.

The Memories I hold

As I've been thinking quite belatedly about my final paper (is it really almost November?????), my musings keep on coming back to a few key ideas. What's mostly been on my mind is the mechanism of memory, i.e. why do we remember in a certain way? How are our memories organized and themed in our heads? This notion I have in mind of the otherworldly properties of memory, how it exists both within and apart from our lives... how memories can see to follow a pattern, a narrative arc, as if we are creating moving pictures of our past in the present.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff, idiosyncratic stuff, stuff that may or may not have any valid point, all jumbled up in my head, but I'm trying to sift through the madness, distill something concise and cogent out of all these incandescent ideas. So I think I will focus on the various ways in which memory is grounded in our lives, how we relate to those memories and the implications therein. Using the text of Never Let Me Go, I want to analyze how the memories of Kathy H., Ruth, and Tommy are fixed to their lives, what common threads seem to tie them together and how this relates to memory in general.

I will divide the paper into sections. The first will expound on the variety of ways that we engage in dialogue with our memories. For instance, MFK Fisher connects to her memories through tastes and the memory of shared meals in exotic locales. Then there is Kingston, who seems instead to connect her memories with stories and myths, the folklore that her life has been steeped in. There's Hemingway who uses the physical location of Paris as a stimulus for his recollections and Gorochova who seems to emphasize certain powerful characters (her mother, her teachers, young lovers) with periods in her memory.

Next, I will give orienting information about Never Let Me Go just for background.

Where Never Let Me Go is concerned, I think that Kathy relates her memories to physical places (Hailsham, the Cottages, Norfolk, etc.), possessions (the titular tape, art in the gallery, items at the sales and exchanges) and of course the complex relationships amongst friends--Tommy, Ruth, and her. I want to explore these three facets of her memory and relate it to my own life, perhaps also speculating about why she remembers along these lines. I will also incorporate the bulk of any textual evidence I want to employ in these sections.... such as excerpts from Kathy's contemplations of Hailsham, how she would drive aimless about the countryside, always unconsciously searching for Hailsham (her memories? the people she's lost? her youth?).

In the last section(s) I want to make some broad, analytical statements about memory and how we relate to our pasts. I'll also make the subclaim here that memory is inherently tied to humanity and that without memory we lose much of what makes us sentient. Obvious support for this claim is how the memories of Kathy and Tommy and Ruth--their intense bond and sense of a collective past--shows that they are human within the book.

Journal Prompt #4

As I read Gastronomical Me this weekend, with its visions of France and ocean-faring life and the grossly indulgent world of true gourmets, I felt oddly deprived, like so much of my life has been wasted eating the simple, coarse fare I had always favored and loved.

Where I'm from, there are no restaurants where one can sit and daintily sup on foie gras and escargot while draining, with unabashed ease, glass after glass of fine, aged wine imported from some fragrant vale in Burgundy or Tuscany, and even if there were, I doubt I would have either the resources or palate to frequent such an establishment. No, I may be many things... but a food snob I am not!

Rich, brown sauces, oysters so fresh "the flanges retract at your breath" and ripe, old cheeses--these things have no place in my culinary memory. My fondest memories of food are often of the simplest sort, cheaply bought and devoured without perfumed airs or persnickety waiters. The restaurants I love are not elegant or quaint in any sense. Oftentimes they are mass-market, chain-restaurant affairs that serve unremarkable foods whose ingredients could be found at any local supermarket in America's suburban wasteland. This is not to say that I don't love good food. I eat ravenously, passionately, with uncouth bouts of laughter and vulgar, sloppy noises. I eat food for the tastes I love and the company I keep: the nutty spice of Pud Thai from the stir fry joint near my school, the guilty joy of McDonalds fries shared at 2:00 AM amongst close friends, the disconcerting delight of fried oreos at the state fair.

Food is about sharing stories and companionable silences. It should not be pretentious. There's no delicacy about the digestive process in my mind. It may be a painstakingly prepared, fabulously seasoned filet mignon or a Burger King whopper and regardless of price or relative enjoyment it all ends up as acidic chime gushing through ones intestinal canals. Of course there are times when a classy dinner is nice. I can remember fondly 12 course meals I've had in Chinese cities with college friends of my parents where the waiters dressed smartly in snappy black vests and the silverware gleamed impressively against the immaculate white tablecloth. Yet what I remember of these meals has nothing to do with the expensiveness of my surroundings or the precious quality of the foods I ate. Instead my mind is caught up int he gaiety of the moment, of my mom's thinly lined face flushed with happiness, the rustling coos of her friends, the way my tongue was always wagging, never silent, Chinese and English flowing as one from the aperture of my lips. I remember Hot Pots we dined at in Chengdu with just as much clarity: how the air smelled of cigarette smoke and herbal tea, how my grandfather had sniffed dismissively as he counted out change to pay for my meal, refusing the money my mother had given me with express orders that I use it. I remember the fiery cauldron before us, the red swirling oils at its heart, the pale, shivering worms and scallops and bok choy we slid into the bubbling pot--how I left with my stomach contentedly full and a flaming numbness blossoming in my mouth.

When I think of all the meals I've had, alone and with company, in 18 years of life the thoughts and tastes all seem to blur together. There's a continuity to it all. Breakfast, lunch, dinner--the procession of these daily benchmarks helps mark the passage of my life. Tastes blaze heady and unforgettable on my memory, and I struggle to describe it in words, my love of food, the sweetness I feel when I think of the Panera Bread near my house where Lauren and I met every Wednesday for slightly singed bagels and warm coffee. I think of all these ordinary moments, these perfectly normal meals I've had, the random snacks I unerringly will buy when I walk into a gas station or the velvety smooth chocolates my mom will randomly buy on a whim from the school-boy vendors with their glossy corporate catalogs and winning smiles.

And never really do I feel the need to question the unhealthy, oily goop I will at times shovel into my mouth. I have no patience for delicacies and ornate foods. I have no knowledge of culinary mystique or favorable wines, and frankly, I don't particularly feel the worse for it.

Food is food.