A need for summation sets my focus rearward. I seek to reconstruct – out of bits and scraps – who I might have been. Not my actuality – that’s long vanished, like rainwater into the sea – but a plausible character – surrounded by plausible characters – in a story that seems to do justice to the pittance of evidence on hand.
I’m not talking memoir. Of all literary forms memoirs are the least truthful. Their motive is corrupt. These authors seek to burnish their image – or repair the damage – dramatizing themselves for descendants real or supposed to secure or reclaim their regard. They mean “to set the record straight” as if any record was, pressing A, B, and C into alphabetic rectitude, omitting inconvenient embarrassments. Their occasional candor, confessing an error here and there, they mistake for guts.
More truthful memoirs are fiction, for there a soul can dare nakedness, hiding in a stranger’s hide. I’d attempt fiction, only I’m ill-provided, for the only character I even half-know is my own, the rest are libels. I fumble for a version of me not to purge, expunge or justify, but to comfortably comprehend and conveniently convey. Thus with any topic that tickles my fancy – America, Rome, music, Shakespeare, Thoreau, say; I don’t seek to “do” them – “definitively” – so they are “done” – but only sufficiently to nod at them in passing like an old pal.
This project resembles the old game of point-to-point one encountered in the scuffed kids’ magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms, where from pencil lines connecting a sequence of numbers a recognizable shape emerged, a horse or flower or star. One awaited the shape to enliven the tedium of waiting – which shape didn’t matter, as long as it materialized before one’s turn was called.
Who was he, then, this C who became me? What connects the toddler to the totterer tapping his laptop? They connect – chronology insists on continuity – but how? I dive in as not long ago I dove into Renaissance painting, not to pronounce but for the bracing thrill of the new. I’ve been one person, one shape, all this while, must have been, but who? Horse, flower, or star?
Why focus on myself and not some more saleable or taxing topic?
Curiosity is the deuce to deduce, why interest gloms onto this and not that. Its deliberations are conducted in secret, no onlookers welcome. Partly, I like writing and need something to write about. Partly, I’m lazy, studying only what I like, never what I ought. Partly, I’m available – “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well,” said Thoreau. Partly, my take on this topic is impregnable, since only I saw what I saw. Partly the past is anyone’s Nova Zembla, a depthless wilderness vivid with discoveries and traps, if we choose to travel there. Partly, pathetically, I seek to be known by any who might care.
It may be argued I’ve covered this ground before in my ceaseless spew. That’s true. Only the past, like the future, never stays still. We dig past recollections into earlier layers. We find to our surprise what we thought we recalled was a lie. We may feel freer to explore, released from the harness of reputation. Memory’s such an easy hammock to loll in past a certain age.
Also, near our close, we may hanker to make sense of where we’ve been, to remind ourselves our story has the importance of interest if not the interest of importance. We came, we saw, we decided and in all we reflected our moment. Isn’t that enough?