Flashing Memories

It’s been a while since I got onto this site or added anything to it, but some reading, and a few days of relative semi-shut-in while we recover from a surprise visit from COVID, turned into opportunity. I have been revisiting some books that had me going a few years ago, and they still have that effect, it seems.

Pema Chödrön, in Welcoming the Unwelcome, writes of a practice she calls “stepping into the flow of impermanence”: “The practice is very simple. Recollect an event or a moment from yesterday or earlier today. Contemplate how it is gone forever, like a past lifetime” (109).  Well, yesterday, I was browsing back through Patti Smith’s The Year of the Monkey. She has been sifting through boxes of old Polaroids, looking for a shot of the games of Roberto Bolaño, stacked in his closet. She finds it. Not much of a shot, really.

But it got me thinking of the other day, scrolling through the photos in our smartphones of our trips to Nice, Paris, etc. One is a shot, of me at a table on Cours Saleya, at midnight, my “Leonardo” pen in hand, up against my jaw, paused while writing in my trip journal. Behind me, a lot of younger – much younger – couples out for an evening. We (Ewa and I) had just enjoyed late-night sangrias (Ewa’s idea. She had read about some characters in a novel sipping them, and wondered, so we had some. Surprisingly good on a hot night on the Riviera).

That image of me took a tiny fraction of  a second to create as a memento, but that moment was already gone (had arguably never truly existed except as created as a gathering of pixels in a phone Ewa no longer even owns) by the time it was taken, before she showed it to me, before she shared it with me, before I considered it as a possible portrait for my own phone or for Facebook. Long before yesterday morning when Patti Smith’s tale of her search brought it to mind.

My phone is full of such photos of me “being a writer”  – and, I suppose, full of missed because unrecorded ghost moments when I was doing much the same thing without Ewa or anyone else there to take (make) the picture. Moments like the time last September outside Les Distilleries on Rue Benoit Bunico, having a Grimbergen Double Ambre and writing a poem about the passing scene as a moment in the history of such passing scenes at that corner.

I read that poem at the Edmonton Stroll of Poets a few weeks later. Right after a smooth-voiced young French woman had rad several of her own poems, a delicious, soft, flowing delivery. Then I got up and read my piece, with its bits of “tourist francais.” Sigh. But she smiled graciously, as did a friend, Pierette, who is Franco-Albertan.

So – where was I? Oh, yes, the photos in my phone. Dozens of them. All created by other phones and their cameras. It’s odd to recall such moments just because they were created digitally in passing. Not that flash of part of a second earlier or later in that ongoing incidental occasion. We had that marvellously relaxing evening on Cours Saleya, but have never (yet) gone back to that table at that time for another sangria. Not yet, anyway.

The T-shirt I am wearing in that photo was a new one, bought, as I recall, the day before, or possible earlier that same day. Definitely on that trip. I still have it, still in my T-shirt drawer, much faded, and currently too large because of the 15+ kilos I have lost since February.

What I really wante4d to say – my phone and many albums of printed photos are full of such created “memorable moments.” Moments in no way more or less memorable than the instants just before or after, though digitally or chemically memorialized. We “make” memories in the random instant. We recall them through random browsing or deliberate searches, for particular or not-too-particular reasons. Such makings are sometimes “official” records of life’s ceremonial moments. Weddings, births children, bits of honeymoon or anniversary trips. Some might even be of places or events we did not truly enjoy, but that as recorded don’t look so bad, looking back.

Then there’s the portrait of me at 32 or 33 (as nearly as I can recall. My “Sherlock Holmes” pose (though I have an Irish hat, not a deerstalker; a briar, not a meerschaum). It was one of a bunch of studies my first wife and I took of each other, learning some tricks of lighting and exposure in our SLR days. I was never that guy, except for that pose for 1/60 or 1/125 of a second.

So – a trick of the light, and a trip of the shutter, and there a non-version of me looks out at another passing version of me, wondering when that version “was,” even if only for a flash. I no longer have that hat or that pipe, or even the sweater I am wearing. That moment has passed, piece by piece, from any chance of being reposed and re-memorialized, even supposing I should ever have wanted to. The negatives? Long-since lost or misfiled. The other shots taken on that occasion? Most never printed except on a contact sheet, I suppose. Passed like the pages in the journal I wrote that night in Nice, or the notes in the notebook I splashed out the original draft of this piece in will or might become, soon enough. Or like the digital record in the phones or in this blog might, one day, in a power or magnetic surge or some other such act of erasure.

Reading for something different in the way of "pleasure."

I didn't get as much reading done this year as usual. At least it feels that way. Didn't maybe get as much writing done, either. It might just be that more of my reading and writing were "professional" and tied to my teaching and other job-related duties. That is often useful, often opens up undetected and unexplored byways for my own curiosity. It's just not quite as satisfying. It feels too much like work for others, not work for my own benefit. (Though I must admit, I do appreciate the paycheques and find them highly beneficial.)

I did get a poem and a short non-fiction piece on winter into the popular (locally) 40 Below, an anthology of writing about winter in Edmonton. And Anna Marie Sewell, the outgoing poet laureate for the city, put a piece I wrote, "Wresting Place," onto her Poem Catcher website, one of her legacies (http://webofvisions.wordpress.com/). And I did get asked to join the board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which means I at least have to spend some more time around poets and their works.

Reading is another thing. The two books that made me sit up and think about where I have been and where I am were both memoirs: Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage, by Darrin Hagen. Both are stories of lives lived dangerously, on the margins and in the Underground, lives that have led to highly productive creative careers, but lives that have also seen the deaths of a lot of loved ones. For Smith it was life in sixties and seventies New York, with Robert Mapplethorpe, working her way to recognition as an artist, poet and singer-songwriter. For Hagen, it was life in the Edmonton drag community in the 1982-1993 period, a life lived as Gloria Hole, and a life leading also to recognition as a multi-talented actor, composer, playwright, writer.

What is the attraction of these books? Part of it is the pleasure of the reading itself. Part is just amazed wonder mixed with gratitude that they lived to tell about those lives, and that they have the talent to tell it so well.

The attraction is not exactly from envy at lives lived in too kind of Blakean excess. Like the rest of my generation--every generation, I suppose--I had opportunities for the kind of wisdom that comes only from going too far. I just did not have the motivation or the testicles for it. I was of the same generation as Smith and Mapplethorpe--but not of the same reckless, relentlessly desperate stamina.  Undoubtedly I was also too chicken, to unready to risk the predictable creature comforts of home on the prairies for cold, inspired starvation in infested apartments in bigger cities--definitely not Big Apple material. And no real incentive or life-models to emulate or guide me along. If I thought of it at all, I thought that kind of life was for other people, talented people but slightly (or extremely) odd and pushed by a creative bent. And I did not really have any ambition, motivation, encouragement, or mentoring to think of myself as "creative." Then, as now, audience material at best, I was programmed and prepared to want and pursue a middle class professional life.

Then, when I got it, as a public librarian in Regina and a newspaper librarian Saskatoon in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, I was bored senseless by it. At least I had a job at a newspaper, and took to the chance to try some writing--entertainment, theatre, and book reviewing, with occasional magazine features, as a relief from boredom and for some modest-sized fish in an even more modest-sized pond kind of recognition. That last was the kicker. People actually began to refer to me as a writer. Occasionally some still do. Good for the ego; bad for the career focus.

Later, I arrived in Edmonton not much later than did Hagen, who had come from an even smaller home town, right out of high school, to find himself in the Big Onion. I was many years older, starting my fourth university degree, and waiting out two divorces: one for me, and one for Eva, so we could start over, together. I was too broke and too focused on Ph.D. studies and getting established in a new marriage and on the child that came along a year later. I just was never really the type for endless nights of drugged and drunken clubbing. So, too chicken, too broke, and too straight.

Now? Well, I've never met Patti Smith, and likely never will. But I have met Darrin Hagen, several times. One of these times I think he might remember that we have met before. That's not exactly a fair observation--when we meet at workshops and other theatre-related events, he makes the connection readily enough. But when he has been emceeing a fashion show for Stanley Carroll, in a dimly-lit venue, and is surrounded by large numbers of friends and fans, then he gets momentarily distracted and has to be reminded for whom he is autographing this copy of his book.

I have seen Darrin perform. I don't think Darrin has ever done a number as Patti Smith. Patti remains an amazing talent, though not nearly glamorous enough to be of interest to Gloria. But I do think it is an act I would go to a club to catch.

NOTE FROM JANUARY 28, FROM DARRIN HAGEN BY WAY OF A MUTUAL FRIEND:

"I have performed patti smith music. In fact, it was my first punk-ish rock chick number. Guess what song? G-L-O-R-I-A of course. It kinda became my calling card."

I really should have seen that one coming.....  A true failure of my imagination.