Lit Bits-7/30/2014 Deborah Wearing, Li-Young Lee

Ally says:

 I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself

- Marcel Proust

I don't read memoirs. I really don't. I think I've read exactly two memoirs in my entire life. One was about a NYC writer who had a kid who went a little bonkers and did some drugs for awhile (which really could be a lot of parent's story) and the other was Forever Today by Deborah Wearing.

It' a terribly cheesy title with a terribly cheesy cover but it tells an utterly amazing story. I stumbled upon this book when I was doing research for a scifi book that I have been writing forever called Palimpsest. It's about time travel and multiple dimensions and stuff but at the core it's about memory.

I have a terrible memory and my terrible memory sort of plagues me. I feel bad about it. I've tried to do those stupid tricks people tell you about to make it better but it hasn't worked. I'm thankful that, at the very least, I've kept a journal since high school so I can at least read about the things I can't remember.

So while I was doing research on memory I came across Clive. Clive Wearing was a brilliant musician who one day got a fever. It was March 1985 and that fever was caused by an infection - herpes encephalitis. When Clive recovered, both the doctors and his wife Deborah were horrified to discover that he retained a memory of only seconds.

Seconds. Deborah Wearing writes the following in Forever Today:

His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.....It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say. “It’s like being dead.”

Some of the most heartbreaking sections of the book include the journal that Clive kept in a desperate attempt to make sense of the meaningless world around him. Each moment was a new beginning:

2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 

2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 

2:35 P.M: this time completely awake... 

At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.... 

I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.

The only moments that provided Clive with any grounding where when his wife Deborah would visit him. But after spending the day with him she would come home to messages begging her to come see him - telling her that it had been ages since they were together instead of just moments. Stripped of the world around him and most of his own history, Clive still always recognized Deborah and loved her dearly.

How maddening and yet, how completely beautiful to find yourself adrift in such a place of love and sickness. Deborah Wearing tells an utterly fascinating tale. For anyone with an interest in that strange organ within our skulls I recommend this book.

I discovered this story by listening to Radiolab's podcast on memory. Here is the piece they did on Clive.



Aleathia says:

In the mid-2000's, as I was climbing out of a motherhood cocoon, I went about rediscovering the part of me that liked to read and write poetry.  My daughter's early years had my undivided attention (save nursing school) and that left little time for me to enjoy the things that make my heart sing.

I remember wandering around Barnes and Noble one day looking for poetry.  Their selection isn't the greatest, but I came across Li-Young Lee and something clicked inside me when I read his work.

Li-Young Lee had a very political and tragic beginning to his life.  He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1957 under duress.  His father had been the personal physician to Mao Zedong in the late 1940's and was forced to flee China.  They went to Indonesia and suffered at the hands of authorities there.  His father was a political prisoner at times.  They eventually fled the country.  The family moved around to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before immigrating to the United States in 1964.  Lee's father was very religious as well as political which had made his life intense.

Lee's life was not a bed of roses emotionally once moving to the US as he struggled with his identity as a Chinese American and his early childhood experiences.  His work is woven with the themes of exile, loss, and family strength.

His book, Behind My Eyes, is one of my favorites:

Trading for Heaven

I saw you at the top of the stairs.

Now I live a secret life.

I saw you holding open the door.

Now I'm filling pages with

things I can't tell anyone.

Now I'm more alone than I've ever been.

I traded every beyond, every someday,

for heaven in my lifetime. Now I'm dying

of my life. Now I'm alive

inside my death.

Do you see the space between our bodies?

Barely a hand, hardly a breath,

it is the space mountains and rivers are made of.

It is the beginning of oceans, the space

between either and or, both and neither,

the happiness of forgetting

our names and the happiness of hearing them

for the first time. I heard you

singing yourself to sleep.

It was a song from both our childhoods.

And now I don't know if singing

is a form of helplessness,

Time's architecture revealed,

or some inborn motive all blood

and breath obey

to enact a savage wheel.

I found you at dawn

sitting by the open kitchen window.

You were sorting seeds in a plate.

And if you were praying out loud,

I'll never tell.

And if you were listening to the doves,

and if their various whoo-ing, and coo-ing,

and dying in time,

are your earliest questions blown back to you

through the ragged seasons,

and if you've lived your life

in answer to those questions,

I'll never tell.

Your destiny is safe with me.

Your childhood is safe with me.

What you decide to bury is safe with me.

Li-Young Lee

John says: 

When I was a kid my old man had this t-shirt that read: So Many Books So Little Time.  Apparently the quote belongs to Frank Zappa.  I never took my old man for a Zappa fan.  Back then I had no clue what that quote meant.  I wasn’t an avid reader as a child.  I missed out on all of the classics unless you counted Batman comics and Baseball Card Monthly amongst the classics.  I was a television kid.  I knew sitcoms.  I knew that Alyssa Milano, Justine Bateman and Lisa Bonet gave me a funny, yet good, feeling.  Books never gave me any kind of feeling.  I didn’t really get why my old man had the t-shirt.  If I’d understood irony at that time in my life I may have understood that t-shirt.  I believe that I still have no true conception of irony, and I don’t like to wear t-shirts with sayings on them.

I didn’t become an avid reader until high school, until I had the desire to write.  I had the desire to write because of the hate that welled up inside of me toward the beautiful people in my age group.  I wrote poems railing against those people and then sent them into my high school literary magazine.  They were mediocre teenage rants at best.  At some point it hit me that I couldn’t write unless I read.  Reading has since become an addiction of mine.  It’s something that I spend most of my free time doing.  I don’t toil with people in the way that I do with books.  And now I don’t have a clue what’s on television.  This is either my human evolution or I’ve just become a pompous asshole. 

The So Many Books So Little Time saying has become a mantra of sorts.  I ponder it often as the stacks and stacks of “to read” books get bigger and clutter the apartment.  It doesn’t help that I’m forever thrown off course with reading.  I’ll make a plan.  I’ll say, okay, nothing but Alberto Moravia novel, but a month later I’m ripping through the new novel by Joshua Ferris, and the stack of Moravia is sitting there collecting library fines.

This happens when I meet people whose literary tastes I’m intrigued by.  Last year on a trip to the west coast I met the novelist, Ezekiel Tyrus (author of Eli, Ely).  Zeke and I talked a bit and we’ve exchanged a few letters.  Of course we’re Facebook friends.  But within the conversation came a whole host of writers whom I’d never read: W. Somerset Maugham, Alexander Trocchi, and Erskine Caldwell to name a few.  As a result whatever I had been reading was suddenly thrown out the door for these new names and books.  Another reading plan was shattered.  Another stack of books went unread.  A new stack formed.  As always Proust would have to wait.

I don’t just do this with fiction either.  I currently have a stack of non-fiction on my desk on topics as wide a Haiku, French literary history, string theory, all the way to biographies on Gustav Mahler and John Quincy Adams.  It’s exhausting but I guess it keeps me going.  I’m trying to settle down and stick with one author again.  W. Somerset Maugham.  I’m one-third of the way through Of Human Bondage.  It started off slow but now it’s picking up some steam as the main character ages into a man.  But the book better stay interesting.  I have a stack of Sinclair Lewis waiting in the wings if it doesn’t.  And that guy keeps calling me and calling me.

Here’s a list of some classic writers (not current) I’m pretty keen on right now: Hans Fallada, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Jack London, Georges Simenon, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo, and Thomas Bernhard.