A Proustian Exercise

 

As a young man I struggled once to claim my earliest memories, and after more than a little bit of thought, I arrived at two. Interestingly, they do not involve people. They are primarily visual and interior. And they happened a long, long time ago. By my reckoning the Beatles had just broken up. Nixon was still unfamiliar with the word, “Watergate.” We were at Half Time of the Vietnam War. The AFL had just merged with the NFL.

In the first memory, which I think is the oldest, I am lying in a crib looking up at the night sky and I see a bright shooting star flashing overhead. Long, slow, with sparkling contrails. That’s my initial feeling, but it is plausible I am a toddler on the balcony of the apartment my parents rented and I could have been watching fireworks.

In the second, I am leaning against the bottom part of a wooden fence, the kind made by laying horizontal beams into slots in the horizontal posts, and before me is a massive field of wheat grain, blowing gently yet very sublimely in the wind. It’s a gray day and this field seems to stretch onwards forever, the ground undulating as it fades into the distance. I recall myself fascinated with this scene. But it could have only been three- or four-year-old me at the fence enclosing our small, weed-infested backyard at same apartment complex.

I dunno.

Anyway, there is a famous French writer name of Marcel Proust. Famous in literary circles, that is. He is primarily known for writing a multi-volume “biography” entitled In Search of Lost Time, in some translations. The style of these books was very unique up to that point: extremely centered on self, on his feelings and impressions, very, very focused on minutiae in a grasping attempt to get at something beyond normal, everyday experience. Something kind of like all of us being sleepers sleeping through life, and such a Proustian examination is meant to create a change in our consciousness of experience.

Or something like that. I’m far from being an expert on Proust. More of a novice’s novice.

I do know he spends inordinate amounts of time and pages on simple, singular experiences. Ten or twelve pages on how he sleeps opens the first volume. Then, later on, he devotes another eight or ten on trying to get a kiss from his mother as a young boy before bed. A hyperslow approach to reality that is at complete odds with current, contemporary, twenty-first century life. (And that appeals oh so much to me.)

Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting idea to try to apply such a Proustian approach to these two early memories. Really, really delve into them: what was I seeing, thinking, feeling? Why sight, but no sound? What were the pinpoint details that have eluded me this past half century? What is the meaning behind – and beyond – these memories? Why them? What was the feel of the wood of that fence? What was the temperature of the air? Why did I believe I was lying in a crib? Was that firework – or meteor – so bright and so yellow and so close to me I felt that I could reach up and touch it? And by all this, come to excavate what they have done to me and for me, stretching out an echoing across the decades, me as an adult?

I’m thinking this would be a good warm-up to my Grand Project. I beginning outlines after compiling pages and pages of notes and plan on starting writing January 1st (to follow a similar pattern to the first book I wrote). If anything good comes from it, who knows? I might publish an excerpt from it here at the Hopper.