Behind the tree, the battle of the nations, the battle of Königgrätz, the fall of communism
Can you feel it? / Must be real. / It feels so good. / It feels so good. / Well I never been to heaven. / But I been to Oklahoma. / Well they tell me I was born there. / But I really don't remember. / In Oklahoma, not Arizona. / What does it matter? /What does it matter?
Never been to Spain, Three Dog Night (1971)
When I hear Never Been to Spain, I can feel the choreography of dressing for combat: the weights of shoulder, back, butt packs and pouches, my M-16. I can smell the confusion of others; hear everybody’s thoughtful silence. I can see the utter dismay of my sergeant, a truly kind, refined, sensitive man, a decorated Vietnam veteran – he had hoped himself well out of war; here he was, now, in peaceful Germany, mobilizing for battle in the Sinai peninsula, as part of Nixon’s grand Soviet containment policy.
The poor man just wasn’t sure he could face it all again.
Karine and I walked back to where the old tank park was. We found no rusty tanks no fatally ruptured armored troop carriers. We did find an elephant
Face it? Face what? More than anything, that it-what was scaring me. I was holding my breath. Luckily for me, for us, for Sergeant Joly, nothing came of all this suiting up for shoot-‘em-up, although… as we say for everything else, nothing is as nothing does and that’s just as good as it should be. No?
“Nothing” can be, I think, for instance, a being like Ohad Naharin, dance hero, director of the Batsheva Dance Theater. He claims in Mr Gaga, a documentary about himself and his work, that his experience in the ’73 Sinai war made him a serious fellow. That’s not nothing. Is it?
It’s true, when the Batsheva dances, it dances serious, not a nerve out of place, not a thought elsewhere. I like it for that, for dancing as if for life’s sake, using all available air.
Did the determination to breathe all the air available really come from that time or am I or Naharin making a trick of memory so that in remembering it, it seems to have done?
A propos of breath held and breath breathed in pursuit of life, I recently read a novel called N’oublie pas de respirer (“Don’t forget to breathe”) that deals with remembrance by the senses. N’oublie pas starts with a good title and goes on to please a reader by both content and construction.
The author, Hélène Frappat, uses the remembrance of odor to construct a novel about a childhood in Corsica. She makes a good story from it; her ability to use sense remembrance to make memory intrigues me a lot because I am not able to.
The complexity of my life experience beats all memory out of me. That's all I can say, because the remembrance of my senses works pretty well. So, as a doctor might say, I have no physical impediment...
For instance. I often walk down the Avenue Parmentier at 8.30 in the morning. Sometimes, I smell standing in front of a small coffee shop on Alameda Avenue, Oakland, California, at rush hour. Sometimes, I smell the exhaust fumes hanging over the tank park of the 7th/11th Armored Calvary Regiment – Black Horse! caserne at Bad Kissingen, Germany, just before dawn. Sometimes, the remembrance there is also touch – my little boy’s tough, hot, little hand in mine – or taste – Snoqualmi wine, an old girlfriend’s kiss – or hearing – the roar of the ocean at Nag’s Head, North Carolina.
But, I just can’t manage to make the remembrances of the senses into a story, into "memory" – as I might formerly have put it – as Frappat so admirably can.
In fact, I can’t bring myself to believe in "memory" in any sense any longer: as far as I am concerned, the story Frappat, or any other romancer or philosopher or choregrapher, for that matter, weaves is as true a memory as any "memory" can ever be.
The real non-existence of memory is why A la recherche du temps perdu was properly translated as “Remembrance of things past” rather than “In Search of Lost Time". Also, why the book is so long - a story pulls the strings of remembrance tight, makes it more compact. The earlier translator obviously actually read the book, since once a sensible person has got through it, she realizes that not only was Proust no fool, he was no fool who believed not in "memory" but in story.
Mnemosyne is as false a god as Yahweh.
I personally stopped believing in memory when my sweetheart, Karine, and I, made a “nostalgia tour” for me at the Bad Kissingen army caserne where I now feel utterly certain I heard Never Been to Spain for the first time on a transistor radio in October, 1973, while anxiously following developments.
Was it there I learned what Winston Smith was feeling about the Malabar Front?
At one point during the tour, Karine and I walked back to where the old tank park – the smell of which my nose, I have said, has remembrance on the Avenue Parmentier – was. We found no rusty tanks or fatally-ruptured armored troop carriers, no aged self-propelled howitzers sunk deep in bramble and broken-up concrete. Instead, we had a Gerard-Manley-Hopkins moment…
long-haired lean beauties stretching up brushes, crooning, / hard-armed red-handed bruisers, torsos gleaming, scrubbing, / great grey elephant tethered to tattered tank spar, / where once were fuel-stained cement and plastic spoil, / with canines saber-seeming and steely claw, / great white tiger with lion-pride grooming, / mares bejeweled and stallion preening.
“You see, Karine,” I think I said, profiting from the moment to slip my arm under hers.
Who can deny that all the reasons, fears, prides, lies – nations, even – have disappeared so thoroughly as to require plaques, stories and statues
I pulled her close; I then felt her slipping away: I heard her heart beat, smelled the perfume of her bosom, the touch of her hair; I knew she looked away.
“Those are animals for that circus that’s just up there,” I told her, “The circus up the hill, around the bend in the road where gay and gallant stripèd tents where once helipads stood!” I smiled.
The nostalgia tour, I then assured myself by squeezing Karine’s incomparable waist, was a success! Here, in the unexpected circus, was true sense, surely. For sense, just as in Hopkins’ poems, is beyond what is said, rooted in what is seen, felt. Not so? Yes, so.
For I had until that empty moment found so little that I remembered in this place that I had realized that my “memory” of the place and that time was entirely at odds with what might have actually existed at any given moment in my experience – experience which I feel now as I feel the breath within me.
I realized suddenly that whatever might have “transpired” or “existed” to become "memory" is simply lost forever in the forward flux of life. So it has since seemed to me that, truly, “memory”, insofar as one might represent it as “having been” is nothing but an indulgence, a fantastic invention of the “nostalgia hormone” or a “gene”, or whatever.
In nature, I know, experience fades into the present like the melodies within polyphonic music, that medieval stuff that mixes bumblebee busy-ness and the crackle and whoosh of flowers blooming; it leaves no trace of before.
In nature, I now know, the present is, forcément, poetic present. In technicolor, too, just like the Wizard of Oz.
And who can deny that the factual tissue of the reasons, fears, prides, lies – nations, even – that sent me smooth-cheeked to an armored cavalry regiment in Bad Kissingen, Germany, have disappeared so thoroughly as to require plaques and a line or two in the school books?
So, call out the makers of stories like Hélène Frappat or Ohad Naharin – the real and metaphorical acrobats, dancers, along with all the fabricators of sense or movement – and let ‘em get down to making memories. I need them as I need the air to keep breathing; and there's nothing so good as a good story, even disguised as memory.