Sunday, August 06, 2006
(9:10 PM) | Brad:
Happy Anniversary!
I'm writing this at 3.15 a.m., in the early morning pre-dawn of my second-year wedding anniversary [ed., though I will have failed to publish it until nearly forty-eight hours later]. My wife, K. has been asleep for nearly two hours, whimpering occasionally, as she is prone to do, fighting those evil machines in her dreams. I sometimes think that if she is half as tenacious in the aether of dream as she is when awake, she must surely & easily win most of those battles. She is, nevertheless, always scolding me in the morning, upon learning (and/or remembering) that she was having a nightmare and I did nothing to help. Such is the flipside, I suppose, of the classic Freudian example of the man who dreams of his son, who had died that night of sickness, crying out to him, "Father, don't you see that I'm burning?" -- only to discover, upon waking, that a candle had fallen and the dead boy's body was burned.The concern keeping me awake tonight, perhaps not uncoincidentally coinciding with the anniversary itself, was my recurrent inability as of late to articulate anything remotely interesting. I was becoming, I decided, painfully dull. I had on hand several excuses: "You're still getting used to being married," or "You're still getting used to living in America again," (neither of which are very credible, though, after two years, are they?), or "Everybody's boring in Cincinnati, relax," or "You really need to drink more." And yet, none of these excuses have thus far been able to put me to sleep.
As I sat down just a moment ago, after fumbling in the dark for the button on the computer that makes me the creator of light, I was reminded of my old narcissistic fear: being forgotten. Most often evident when I apply for a job or a scholarship, or even when I send a friendly email and do not receive a response, well, immediately, I've decided that such a fear came down to an equally narcissistic fear of dying. Of not being able to remind people that I ever was, whose memory is left to the vagaries of posterity, chance, and the ability to live a life worth remembering -- fondly or otherwise. Is this, I wondered, why I used to write letters, as though my life depended on it, to people I never even speak to anymore? Why, in fact, I spent so much time writing at all -- as though words were worth more than I, they being, after all, the currency of my trade. If so, why did I stop? In no longer writing, in no longer seeking rembrance, do I somehow now fear death any less?
How to speak, somebody somewhere once wrote, of the not-I without screaming?
UPDATE [08/07]:
A related paragraph from a novel:
She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savoring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregrate of meanness which compose identity, inflames never reaching full roaring cresendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronized, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, doubled-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.
