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Charles
Simic
Frankfurt,
Germany, 1946 Henry James
called them “traps to memory” in The American Scene, the book he wrote
about
his visit to the United States in 1904 after a twenty-year absence.
Walking on
West Fourteenth Street and Lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he
shuddered at how
much the neighborhood had changed. His parental home, the massive stone
church
that stood nearby, the old building that housed the original
Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and much else in the city had now “vanished as utterly
as the
Assyrian Empire.” What remained were these “traps” which “baited
themselves
with the cheese of association,” and into which anyone who had once
known the
city might fall. It doesn’t
take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight
lingering on the
upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already
deep in
shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again. Since we are
ordinarily better at forgetting than remembering, it is often a mystery
why
some such sight has stamped itself on our memory, when countless others
that
ought to have far greater meaning can hardly be said to exist for us
anymore.
It makes me suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our
lives
would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a
coherent
narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments,
spur-of-the-moment
reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working. For
instance, just recently in New York, I walked past a store selling
cheap
jewelry where fifty years ago, I realized, there had been an Italian
restaurant. To my surprise I recalled what happened to me there one
evening. I
was dining with a woman I was wooing, we were sipping wine and
flirting, when I
bit into a stale breadstick and broke what felt like my front tooth.
Without a
word of explanation, I mumbled some excuse and rushed off to the
bathroom to
take a look inside my mouth. To my horror, I found a hole where my
tooth had
been just moments before and the missing piece dangling at the end on
my
tongue. I had no idea what to do next: go back to our table and try to
talk
with my mouth just barely open, or confess what had happened and let my
date
see the gap and risk her laughter and her revulsion? Since it turned
out that
she couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I opened my mouth and told
her the
truth. She suppressed her shock, told me tenderly and reassuringly that
it
didn’t even show, and then, unable to hold back any longer, cackled out
so loudly
that the people at other tables turned around with puzzled expressions
to look
at us. No wonder I’ve never wanted to think about that night again. I believe it
was Aristotle who said that memory—which he regarded as a collection of
mental
pictures with a time element added to each of them—belongs to the same
part of
the soul as the imagination. That may explain why we can never be sure
how much
of what we remember is true and how much of it is made up.
Nevertheless, the
kind of experiences Henry James describes concern a sudden eruption of
long
buried memories on which there is no time to do any retouching. Just
this fall,
riding in a cab down Park Avenue toward Grand Central Station, I caught
sight
of a building where, I now happened to remember, an early model Xerox
machine
with slow-turning rollers tore up my baptismal certificate into many
small
pieces when I tried to make a copy. I was working the graveyard shift
in a
bank; it was summer and almost daylight and while my co-workers lay
sprawled
over their desk snoozing, I swept into the trash the minced remains of
the
hand-written document issued in May of 1938 and signed by a priest in
St.
Mark’s Church in Belgrade, which my mother carried sewn with other
important
papers into the lining of her overcoat as we crossed several borders,
some of
them legally and some not. I don’t know if, after its destruction, she
ever
asked if she could look at it and what lies I might have told her. As
for me,
had I not seen that building this fall, I would never have thought of
it again.
Buildings
are famous memory traps. This summer I walked past a tenement where I
lived
with my wife for a couple of years in the 1960s and remembered
something odd
about that building. We had a fire alarm almost every day, except there
wasn’t
really a fire, nor was it a totally false alarm. Some days one could
smell
smoke in the hallways, but then, mysteriously, nothing would happen.
Being on
the second floor with a fire escape outside our window, we didn’t worry
much.
When we heard fire engines, we’d poke our heads out and watch. The
firemen
would run into our building dragging a long black hose and we’d go back
to
whatever we were doing, cooking dinner or making love. The landlord had
hired
an arsonist, the rumor went, to set us on fire and collect insurance,
but he
was a bungler. We ran into the landlord from time to time and he did
look like
a shifty character capable of doing us harm, though one could tell that
he had
the very same opinion of his tenants. With five or six radios
simultaneously
playing at high volume and children screaming and grownups arguing, we
learned
to tune out most of what went around us until it couldn’t be ignored.
Once we
had a large dinner party evacuate to the fire escape carrying bottles
and wine
glasses. Another time, my wife and I were in a tub on a hot July night
drinking
gin and tonics when the alarm sounded. We didn’t budge. We figured we
were safe
in the water. The other day I sniffed around the entrance, smelled no
smoke and
saw no familiar names on the mailboxes. Everything looked pretty much
as it did
then, except older and shabbier and, unlike years ago, as quiet as a
tomb. Charles
Simic November 19,
2012, 11:07 a.m.
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