Ongoingness Page 3

  Another friend wrote to ask all the desperate questions I used to ask before I became a mother. How old were you? How long were you married? How long did it take?

  I wrote back, One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children. ♦

  Time kept reminding me that I merely inhabit it, but it began reminding me more gently.

  In a dream I found an old-fashioned windup metronome on my desk. A man’s voice behind me: Is that really a metronome on your desk?

  In another dream an old woman told me that at my age, she wished she’d known that the soul never stops appearing. ♦

  Perhaps it was all the years studying the piano repertoire of the great prodigies, or perhaps it was studying alongside some actual prodigies—one of them was blind—but when I turned seventeen I became convinced I had fallen into a life of irreversible failure.

  The stench of failure—I felt it coming to cover me.

  Now I am old enough to know what I’ll never accomplish. I will never be a soldier, a physicist, a thousand other things. It feels like relief.

  Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.

  I use my landlady’s piano as a writing desk. ♦

  My students still don’t know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

  I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don’t value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don’t care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what’s coming next.

  I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.

  That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure—when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time. ♦

  Trapped in a party conversation with two young people, I wanted to wait with them in the smoky hallway for fifteen years so I could hear what they’d say when they were forty. ♦

  In another dream my tiny toothless son had all his teeth. I’d looked away long enough for all the teeth to emerge, even the back molars, the teeth beating time in months, in years, his full jaws a pink-and-white timepiece.

  In the next dream his downy hair had grown very long and I needed to cut it off with dull scissors. Again his body had recorded time passing, time that had escaped my notice. ♦

  For months the baby woke at seven, fed, fell asleep at eight thirty, woke at ten, fed, fell asleep at eleven thirty, and so on for the rest of the day. I’d made him into a milk clock.

  Every hour was part of a ritualized ceremony of adding or subtracting milk. A river of milk flowed in and out and around him. He floated down the milk river toward the rest of his life. ♦

  One explanation for the loss of preverbal memories maintains that after acquiring language, one forgets how to access those preverbal memories.

  As I watched the baby play with his toys I remembered an orange plastic panel fixed to the rails of my own crib. A round red rubber air bladder the size of my fingertip. A bell. A black-and-white crank that clicked. A blue-and-red sphere that spun fast in its housing and looked purple.

  My brain had stored this memory—all the textures and colors and shapes and sounds. If you had asked me six months earlier if it were possible to retain infant memories into adulthood I would have said no, but I carried this memory without looking at it for thirty-eight years. ♦

  As I fed the baby with a little spoon I remembered a spoon scraping dribbled food from my chin and tipping it back into my mouth. That dribbled food, already tasted and diluted with saliva, never tasted good.

  What else was on the orange panel? The bell and the crank and the spinning ball rang and cranked and spun. The air bladder forced the clapper up. I could see it moving up and striking the silver bell anchored by its silver bolt.

  I remembered wanting to press the little red bladder again, again, again. Spinning the ball again, again, again. Wanting to see the purple. Wanting to hear the bell. I liked that it kept ringing.

  Then I remembered a mirror.

  I believed I was trying to remind myself of how it had felt to be wordless, completely of the physical world—that even before my body was an instrument for language it had been an instrument for memory. ♦

  It used to be that things always reminded me of a lot of other things.

  Then, for eighteen months or so, they didn’t. In the diary I recorded only facts. Minutes of nursing, ounces of milk, hours of sleep.

  Things were just themselves. I was too exhausted or hormone-drunk or depressed to think of anything that resembled anything else.

  That’s how things appear to an infant. ♦

  One postpartum day it took me forever to remember the word obsolete. Another day, suggestible. Another, fennel. Does the mother of an infant need a smaller lexicon? Does she need a specifically limited lexicon? Did I not need to think about fennel then? About abstractions? ♦

  I remember from childhood that, from the point of view of a child, a mother is a fixed entity, a monolith, not a changing, evolving human organism who is qualitatively similar, in many ways, to a young person.

  Recently I became not quantifiably old but qualitatively old. Old as a state of being. As an acceptance that I’ve more or less become the person I had a chance to become.

  I’ve been basically the same person since I had my son. I know this isn’t true for all new mothers, especially those who are younger than I am (and most of them are). But I feel like a monolith now. I’ve emerged from a gauntlet, and it has something to do with having become a mother, and it has something to do with having become qualitatively old, and it has something to do with having run out of time and life to perceive and ruminate and record my minutes and days in the diary.

  What I’m saying is that I have become, in a way, inured to the passage of time. I’m not really paying attention to what’s happening to me anymore—no longer observing steadfastly the things that have changed since yesterday. ♦

  I’m watching my little son change, though, from day to day and minute to minute. Watching him learn things is like watching a machine become intelligent, or an animal become a different animal. It’s terrifying and beautiful, and this has all been said before.

  On the island where my husband grew up and where his mother lived and died, we see a rainbow every day. Not just a segment of a rainbow fading in and out but the whole bright bow of it, sometimes in double and triple arcs. Rainbows are so common there, they print them on the drivers’ licenses. They are no less amazing for their prevalence. Ditto birds, trees, stars, clouds, children, and so on. To the laws of supply and demand the real world is immune. ♦

  When the baby was eight months old, I realized I’d stopped identifying with the man saying Hi, Mom! and felt myself becoming the mother who hears him say it, the mother who will someday leave her boy alone. ♦

  The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears.

  My prose began to judge or summarize its subject before it took any time to observe that subject. I couldn’t help attaching that tendency to the subject itself: the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation.

  The tendency to summarize rather than to observe and describe—would taking that time to observe and describe be selfish, wasteful, nonmaternal time?

  Is it possible to truly observe one’s own child, as a writer must, while also simultaneously loving him? Does a mother have something like writer’s block—perceiver’s block? ♦

  Left alone in time, memories harden into summaries. The originals become almost irretrievable.

  One day the baby gently sat hi
s little blue dog in his booster seat and offered it a piece of pancake. The memory should already be fading, but when I bring it up I almost choke on it—an incapacitating sweetness.

  The memory throbs. Left alone in time, it is growing stronger.

  The baby had never seen anyone feed a toy a pancake. He invented it. Think of the love necessary to invent that. In a handful of years he’ll never do it again. An unbearable sweetness.

  The feeling strengthens the more I remember it. It isn’t wearing smooth. It’s getting bigger, an outgrowth of new love. ♦

  Since the baby was born I still occasionally wonder whether I should have a baby, whether I should get married, whether I should move to this or that city I’ve already moved to, already left. All the large questions still float about me, and in its sleep-deprived dampened awareness of the present moment, my memory treats these past moments as if they’re all still happening.

  I’ve never understood so clearly that linear time is a summary of actual time, of All Time, of the forever that has always been happening. ♦

  A year postpartum, my memory was still afflicted. I enjoyed writing because within days, I forgot what I’d written, and rereading it was like reading a letter from someone else.

  In class my students repeated what they claimed I’d said during the previous class, and, not remembering the words as my own, I found myself approving of them vaguely. ♦

  My life felt full before I became a mother, but I’ve found that trying to say that I prefer having the baby to not having him sounds aggressive. In fact I’d felt affronted, before I was a parent, when parents told me, even in the gentlest terms, that they preferred having their children to not having them.

  Maybe the trouble is that the shape of life is elastic, that it can feel and be full at variable levels of fullness. Or maybe we’re poor judges of our own lives’ fullness. Or maybe the concepts of emptiness and fullness are poor metaphors for happiness, if in fact happiness is what we’re talking about. ♦

  Let me put it another way: when I am with my son I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience. ♦

  The trouble was that I failed to record so much, I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything? ♦

  I wrote about an illness once I was seven years into a remission that lasted four more.

  I didn’t know it yet, but the illness, which still isn’t over, wasn’t the real problem. Thinking about it was the problem, and I don’t think about it anymore. Not in the obsessive, all-consuming way I used to.

  I used to harbor a continuous worry that I’d forget what had happened, that I’d fail to notice what was happening. I worried that something terrible would happen because I’d forgotten what had already happened.

  Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing. ♦

  Once I’d spent two years hobbled by an impaired memory, I worried less about everything I was forgetting.

  I forgot to buy milk this week. I forgot to file taxes last year. And on I go. ♦

  The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.

  Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity. ♦

  Why, then, should I continue writing the diary?

  In it I digest the time that passes, file it away so I no longer need to think about it, and if I spent all my time thinking about the past I’d stop moving into the future, I begin to write, but no—I’d keep moving. How ridiculous to believe myself powerful enough to stop time just by thinking.

  There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some point—and that, at some other point, I’ll stop. ♦

  Often I believe I’m working toward a result, but always, once I reach the result, I realize all the pleasure was in planning and executing the path to that result.

  It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me—that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing. ♦

  Before the baby was born, the diary allowed me to continue existing. It literally constituted me. If I didn’t write it, I wasn’t anything, but then the baby became a little boy who needed me more than I needed to write the diary. He needed me more than I needed to write about him.

  The time I spent sitting and nursing and holding the baby and cleaning up his messes could have borne the worry from me as completely as I bore the baby, which in my experience marked a change of mind that by now seems permanent. ♦

  Before I was a mother, I thought I was asking, How, then, can I survive forgetting so much?

  Then I came to understand that the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time. ♦

  Now I consider the diary a compilation of moments I’ll forget, their record finished in language as well as I could finish it—which is to say imperfectly.

  Someday I might read about some of the moments I’ve forgotten, moments I’ve allowed myself to forget, that my brain was designed to forget, that I’ll be glad to have forgotten and be glad to rediscover as writing. The experience is no longer experience. It is writing. I am still writing.

  And I’m forgetting everything. My goal now is to forget it all so that I’m clean for death. Just the vaguest memory of love, of participation in the great unity. ♦

  When I remember how this document began, I remember it as something I used to worry about. ♦

  My son goes happily on.

  One of his first words was bamboo. Everywhere we went, he called out to the bamboo that was or wasn’t there. Bamboo! He called his bear Bamboo and fell asleep whispering its name.

  Time passed. He grew accustomed to the world. He learned more words.

  His bright hair grew long.

  Everything is new. His first lizard. His first funeral. Now we measure his age in years.

  The future happens. It keeps happening.

  The man is still alive, but the boy is gone. The light is out.

  His light is out yet it shines triumphant from the next of the living, and when their time is up, their potential spent, the light will move along to the next brightest, and the next.

  A flash—and I’m gone, but look, the churn of bodies through the world of light unending.

  Look, here we are, even now—

  Afterword

  I asked a few friends whether they thought I should excerpt the diary in this essay, praying they would say no.

  None of them did.

  But I didn’t want to read the thing, so I tried to reason my way out of the task. I envisioned a book without a single quote, a book about pure states of being. It sounded almost religious when I put it that way. I wasn’t sure what I meant, but I hoped it sounded convincing. A book about pure experience couldn’t quote sources. Its only source could be experience itself.

  I was afraid that if I read the diary, I’d have to change what I’d written about it from memory. And producing even those few thousand words had been so arduous, I couldn’t bear the thought of having to rewrite them.

  But I was even more afraid of facing the artifact of the person I was in 1992 and 1997 and 2003 and so on. Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us—by taking everything. I’m still ashamed of things I said and did in front of one other person even if that person is dead.

  I reread my favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection. I imagined how sick I might feel after reading the diary, the writing that stands in for my entire self.

  It was while reading a letter from a childhood friend who continues to provide health care to people in underserved communities that I realized the jig was up. If I was never going to place malar
ia pills into the hands of the destitute, I needed to get my act together. I had to be sure I wasn’t keeping anything from the world that might help it along. If the point was to write things that prevent people from committing suicide, the least I could do would be to read my own diary. Just in case.

  I realize how grandiose that sounds, but when your job is to think and write about yourself, the stakes start to appear artificially, comically high. And they must, for without them, I wouldn’t write at all. I’d spend the day reading the internet. I’d be about half-done by now.

  As luck had it, a few weeks after making the big decision, I boarded a plane for a six-hour trip. I’d prepared for it by bringing nothing to read except my diary. The plane took off. Beverage service began. I drank half a cup of bitter coffee and opened the first of the twenty-three files.

  As I read it I copied the passages I thought people might find interesting. There were some potent bits about social class. A few sexual oddments. By the time I got to 1995 I was on my way. What a year that had been.

  After I’d skimmed about a hundred thousand words, I looked at what I’d collected, expecting a well-curated assortment of tidbits—something like ten pages of a David Markson novel.