Memory

Bruce McClure film

Wim Wenders film

In the patch quilt world inside my noggin, I wonder which romantic memories I’ll be able to smuggle into the next life after I die. You know, like items that friends or relatives place into your coffin to help you on your future journey: coins on the eyes with which to pay Charon to row you across Lethe; or a cake of wax to help a deceased surfer just in case it is in short supply in Brahmaloka; perhaps an iPod to kill time standing in line, for surely there’s a certain amount of that—at least until one gets one’s bearings, meets some old friends to show them the ropes. And though the afterlife probably isn’t as prosaic as all that, (lots of mystery and the science of entropy enter the conversation), the formulaic literary death is good enough for me, or at least good enough for my game of imagining which romantic memories I’ll like to take along.

Now, since I’m not so sure my powers of recollection will be unhampered for a spell, I think it best to take along a dvd player or better yet a vhs/dvd player and I can surround myself in versions of films in which LOVE was captured in ways I understood, or I had lived through, or had prayed for. Where all this metaphysical language is coming from I can only guess, but if death comes a knockin’ I’d like a copy of Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS to watch.

The video clip which I downloaded on this page is largely taken from a Super 8mm “home movie,” as they were referred to in the 1970’s. The color is dense and looks like ektachrome, which harkens back to earlier days. No-one develops the stock any longer due to chemicals felt to be dangerous in the processing, but it was gorgeous. After shooting your raw stock in one of those handle held cameras, the film was processed and projected. No prints were struck from original negative. The film which you shot was actually the film that passed through the projector onto your portable living room screen. The motion was usually herky-jerky, the focus passed from soft to kinda sharp and the exposure was generally inconsistent at best. In fact the hand-held imagery Wim Wenders replicated in this movie-within-a-movie was very common before video cameras became the standard for every parent shooting family scenes. Since I was born in 1948, my memories tend to look more like those Dean Stockwell is screening for his brother, played by Harry Dean Stanton. One look at Harry Dean Stanton’s ragged, wrinkled face smiling in the front seat of the car or on the beach with his wife and son is heart-wrenching. For many people a smile is common, but not so in Harry Dean Stanton’s role. To watch him clowning in his Richard Petty hat and to see his young affectionate wife holding him in complete trust delineates the only period in his raggedy-assed life that happiness was his ally. When we meet him in the movie, he hasn’t had any emotion for a long, long span of time—years and years. A smile is as foreign to him as a shave or a haircut. He has, in the metaphorical words of Robert Frost, “outwalked the furthest city light.” So, when he views his past with the help of the “home movie,” it holds an emotional punch that knocks me to my knees. The vagaries of love are dangerous and powerful. I believe he periodically glances over at his son by the aquarium tank to give himself a reprieve from the onslaught of feelings which the 8mm movie provides. The clip in Italian was all I could find to use.

MEMORY:
Retaining and reviving impressions.
Recalling or recognizing previous experiences.
Reminiscence
Retrospection
Recognition
Reminder of what is past or gone.
Souvenir
Vestige
Temporal document
Memento
Sinew reconnecting to bone
Dynamic re-generator of emotions
Story retold subjectively
Cognitive/emotional link
Any perception 200-500 milliseconds old
A usually deceptive process of experiential retrieval
Something that bleeds all over the place
`


A Kenneth Patchen Poem:

This room has mystery like a trance
Of wine; forget-me-nots of you
Are chair and couch, the books your
Fingers touched. And now that you

Are absent here the silence scrapes
A secret rust from everything;
While sudden wreaths of sorrow's
Dust uncover emptiness like halls
To stumble through, and terror falls.

.