Insomnia

Insomnia before your first day (afternoon) of grad school is less than ideal. In fact, it's somewhat annoying. But I can't seem to convince my mind to shut off. What with moving into a new apartment and community, starting school, trying to figure out what to do with my days (since classes are all in the afternoon/evening), and catching up with friends after a productive summer, I'm all awhirl. But these aren't the only things keeping me up.

Forgetting. Sometimes it's the easiest part, and sometimes it's the hardest. Isn't life funny that way? It's scary, really, how quickly one forgets one's previous selves. Ok, let's not kid ourselves here--how quickly I forget my previous selves.

Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook" has always resonated with me. I'm not going to be able to write about it comprehensively at 4:00 am, but I've always believed this to be one of her most perceptive lines:

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not."

That line in specific remained in my head; I just went and took down the book to copy it into this post. I intended to proceed from there to my own ruminations on the topic of self and forgetting, but I find that, after all, Didion has done it for me. The proceeding lines read (eerily enough):

"Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."

And it's true. And it's completely terrifying--especially when one has a sneaking suspicion that one is about to lose a person who was better, in many ways, than the one she is now. (I'm back to 'one' again. Forgive me.)

For instance, my previous self didn't write self-indulgent spur-of-the-moment blog posts in the middle of the night and actually post them.

Clearly, I'm degenerating.
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How in the world am I to know who and what to believe about myself?

(And don't even think about telling me to block out the other voices and listen to my heart or to my mind. If it was that easy, don't you think I'd have figured it out on my own?)
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Water and Reflections

"Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever."
--Moby Dick, page 28

"...And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."
--Moby Dick, page 29

Lead me to the river, set me upon an island, and there will I make my home.
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Language as Music, Prism, and Mirror

"He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.—

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose."

--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, page 119

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Sunday

The sweet strains of jazz lured me forward, awaft on the airy blue furrows of the soft breezeless day. With only my whims to follow, I sauntered toward the sound and lurked at the corner of the small gathered crowd. The sign perched in an open guitar case at their feet read “The Baby Soda Jazz Band,” a pile of green bills strewn messily across the black velvet. An older man in a white t-shirt with a grizzled face plucked at a one-string bass, and a thirtysomething adorned with tattoos and sunglasses strummed at a banjo. The low bluegrass twangs melded with the pure jazz of a trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. As I approached, the trumpeter, a man in his seventies with lively eyes, took a solo, clear brassy notes flirting with the melody. The game was picked up by the trombone player, a pretty girl in a backless patchwork sundress, who slipped the golden slide in and out with obvious gusto. With her final notes she turned to the clarinetist, conferring the spotlight upon the tall young man with short blond hair and bright blue eyes, which shut tight as he blew into his instrument. His fingers flew along the black and silver rod and gleeful notes escaped, one following the next, in rapid succession. High, low, high, very high, every single sound precisely on pitch, combining to create a composition specifically tailored to the brightness of the day. I was enthralled, and edged nearer the group.

The music was friendly and welcoming, inviting every live soul in the park to come and enjoy the swinging spirit of the 1920’s made quaint by the passing of time. The upbeat, toe-tapping sounds completely lacked the intimidating exclusivity of radicalism and trendiness, or the snobbery of high-class lyricism and virtuosic expectations. The band members themselves, standing in front of the curves of a black granite bench, radiated no standoffishness, marked no hallowed area for a stage. Spectators, clapping and smiling, stood in a semi-circle around them or sat on the bench directly behind them, participating in the show, exhaling a joy created by music and sunshine, good will and mutual enjoyment.

These musicians sewing sounds to match the scene, weaving their artistry into the weather, were real. They smiled, they chatted, they looked at the crowd and appreciated each hand as it met another to create applause. As they began a new song, an older woman in a pink polo shirt and khaki capris rose from the granite bench beside the band and casually began to sing. Her birdlike voice was not easy to hear above the instruments, but it was clear and trilled, an accessible jazzy siren, familiar enough to make me wish I were singing beside her.

I instinctively liked these people, and their music spoke aloud a simple, glad language. I felt a desperate desire to share in their song, to lend my voice to the instruments, to join them seamlessly, hitting just the right notes, adding to and thickening the harmony. becoming one of their group as effortlessly as cool spray fell from the geysers of the park’s fountain toward the ground. Instead of merely stifling my feelings and passing on, as I have done too often before, I chose to stay, finding an open spot on the bench right behind the performers. I felt emboldened by the sunshine, and as the song ended, I applauded with sincerity, thankful for the generosity of talent shared modestly but without reservation in the open air.
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Pieces

Little pieces first, flakes that flicker as they fly, tiny points of light that scatter like embers and settle, glowing a moment, then gone. But then larger portions, something given never returned, shreds of innocence fleeting. Soon enough it’s noticeable, the chunks missing here, there, you can see it in my eyes. Do they have them, guard them, treasure them? Have they been dissolved, evaporated to invisibility? Assimilated into new forms, living lives of their own? Or were they cast off, like a thing contaminated? They were pure, once, as was I, trust beaming from every pore. Now scratched and duller, I wonder—is it only polish I need? Do souls regenerate? Or will the holes remain, a gaping reminder of lost self, willingly and involuntarily bestowed?
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Waking Up

This morning I was woken up by birds. Not the polite, cheerful twittering of movies and sound effects, but a loud, rude, repeated honking. The honking bird would say his bit, and another bird would answer, with a flat, trilling laugh ending in an unpleasant buzz. HO-onk, trill, buzz, HO-onk, trill, buzz—over and over again, at first background noise, then pushing itself steadily into my dreams, bringing with it consciousness. Still mostly asleep, I listened, noted. This was not the honking of taxis I had become accustomed to in the city, not the wailing of sirens, not even the loud clatter of rain on the protruding air conditioner box. The sounds that now intruded on my rest were natural ones—and yet no less obnoxious. With sleep still clinging to me, I smiled a mental smile. The unceasing calls drew me nearer and nearer to open-eyed awareness, and I noticed every crease and whistle, the nuances that made each sound unique, uniquely annoying.

“Oh,” I thought, “it’s good to be home.”
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