memory of a long gone step

 

Neither the old shoe, nor the new, but another shoe entirely.

Dear Y'all,

Did you ever have a memory in your foot?  An embodied thing, like everyone likes to say now; a step that felt in a shoe today like a step from long ago in a totally different shoe?  A sort of déjà shoe?  I got some new shoes a week ago, I could fill a page with talk of the way shoes are sold now, as 'recovery' wear, for instance, but that too is another digression.  And yet.  You know you don't come here for the straight talk.  You come here to beat about the bush, to stalk the topic, slowly, discursively, with no particular place to go, maybe even hoping we never arrive....

And yet, these new shoes are an odd amalgam of very soft materials (unwoven felt, I'd say) and very tough materials (a beefy Vibram rubber sole).  Well, I couldn't resist that strange union, I guess, but the point is, I got them, and I am wearing them, and they have another contemporary shoe detail, they have that heel that is hinged with elastic; you are meant to shove your foot in hastily and let the back of the shoe flatten out under your heel.  Wearing them like this, in a manner I imagine would horrify certain aged cobblers in Italy, there is a specific fold of material felt under your heel, and it was this that my foot remembered: another shoe, another day.

They were clunky, chocolate brown lug-soled sandals with large buckles- a noisy clomping shoe, that I used more and more 'around the house' after I'd worn them to fairly shabby looking over 3 or 4 years; and when I wore them around the house, I'd skip the back heel strap, and just leave it folded under my heels.  And that is what my foot remembered.  

My Black Sedan

 

Notebook Page: Addendum- a thing added or to be added, ca. 1968.  Eva Hesse.

Dear People,

If you are 'my people' you will know exactly what I mean, and maybe you don't even need to read this letter, but, if you are anyone else, you will want to hop into my Black Sedan, and let me tell you about the things I have been reading.  It is all memoir and auto fiction for me at this location in the mapping of my present via a fitful and clumsy reviewing of my past (revisionist history?).  Okay, you can call it the same old existential crisis, but I think maybe it is just living.  In any case, I am waiting for the leaves to fall, like I do, and I am reading all these great women writing their experience of living.  The thing that is so wonderful is that it feels like home; like a mirror; like this mirror.  

Maybe all we can ever have is reflections, but these images feel close to what I think could be true.  Jenny Erpenbeck says "...we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood.  Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak."  Sing it, sister!  My wayside is littered with the things I meant to say and the questions I wanted to ask.  Like this one:  What, then, do I do instead of trying to get people to like me?  Or this one;  Why did you keep on giving me all that false hope? 

Claire Dederer writes that you find yourself "...flying the flag of idleness and melancholy.  You find yourself not just wanting to do nothing but somehow needing to do nothing.  Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?"  And haven't we said things that amount to this to each other nearly every time we meet?  Déjà vu!*

Which, because I am reading also Biography of X, brings me to the notion of conviction in making art.  I have often found intention to matter, to be required for making art, but I am ready to let conviction be the one that got away.  I wish someone had told me it was fine to let ambivalence be my muse, but, let's not cry over that spilled milk, let us instead assert that ambivalence is just the ticket for art making, and even for living.  My years of desperately seeking conviction should not be your story; maybe you will want to tell a story that goes like this:

One fine Spring day I set out to make my way in the world, and I met many strange and wonderful beings along the way, and I hoped they would like me, but I also knew it was okay if they didn't.  I could give them things, little trinkets I found, an acorn cap, or a stone, and it was only just that: a giving that neither made or unmade me; their acquisition was not my diminishment.  The little things they might give me, magic passwords and permissions, well I was free to use them as long as I liked, but also free to discard them if they began to feel confining.  The continuing exchange of ideas and words and deeds was the main thing, the quest was just sort of there so if any dolts should ask you what you were doing, you could answer that you were seeking the fair princess imprisoned in her turret.

  

*  Olivia Rodrigo is another of the real, non-animated Disney Princesses, like Annette Funicello, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Demi Levato, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, etc.  

Notes:  Erpenbeck, Jenny.  Not a Novel- A Memoir in Pieces, New Directions, New York, page 143.                    Dederer, Claire, Love and Trouble- A Midlife Reckoning, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 9. 

 

Gone

Dear Those Who Have Gone On,

I was looking through some boxes of snapshots-  I know you will recogninize the feeling- like so many drifts and avalanches of déjà vu.  All those different people, so many of them dead and gone, or forgotton, and many of them are me.

It's an exisitential crisis in saturated color on a 5 inch scrap of paper.  It probably isn't good for humans to have this much self awareness.  On the other hand, why is it so sad?  Why would years that I know were perfectly good years, perfectly fabulous times, now gone, bring sadness to consider them?  Is it just "the missing," or is it "the lost and never was anyway?"  I do not know.  But I intend to keep on poking at the sleeping beast.  Yesterday must have some meaning, some relevance for today.  But, it's like a dream you can't quite remember; all sliding away even as it forms on the back of your eyeballs.

Looking at the past in photographs is a form of transcendental time travel, only it isn't working right.  Whatever working right would mean.  I don't think it would mean that everything would prove to have a rhyme and a reason, but I think it would allow you to proceed with less doubt and more truth.  It would mean that you could be that bright spirit that you would like to be, without having to wish for it. 

Anyway, when I saw your picture, I thought of you, and I wanted you to know that I miss you.