My Last Blog

Yesterday, out of the blue I woke up sick. So if my last blog sounds weary and tired, it's because I am. And though my body hurts, and my brain is taking a vacation; though the warmth of the summer sun calls to me, I am still going to miss Dr. Sexson and his wisdom. No other teacher speaks so comfortably about life as a dream, about dreams as reality, about our future and past both burning in the present. No other teacher would question reality like Dr. Sexson because teachers are not supposed to do that. And I imagine few and far between are the English teachers who are literary sleuths like our teacher. Sometimes I feel that I will never be able to decipher a text, or make the kind of connections between works that my fellow students do. Sometimes I feel like Maggie does--frustrated and left out. But at other times, while reading one book or another, a smile will slowly spread my lips. An allusion to another work! At times like these I feel so smart, and I always think of how proud Mr. Sexson would be of me. So you see, he has infected me. The curse of never being able to read the same way, or the same old books, is upon me. Two semesters of Sexsonism has changed me.

I think my favorite moment of the class was being told the story by Dr. Sexson of the old woman on the plane. If anyone else had told the story, it would not have been the same. In his voice was the magic of the encounter, the magic in a story. His story wonderfully illustrated the fiction of everyday life. I will never be able to stop myself, everytime I board a plane, from thinking of his story. Will I see that old lady with the numbers on her wrist?

Adults Should Not Suck On Stones

I think Beckett is my favorite from this class. I don't know why for sure I say that, but I said it and now it is done. I love Molloy. I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, which is a place that is filled with vagrants and vagabonds and scoundrels. Homeless people are all over and they come in every shape, size and flavor. I think I have met a few Molloys in my time. What I mean is that I have encountered certain homeless people who, through vigorous study I have found, have managed to disentangle their soul from the material world and look at everything they see in a new way, everytime they see it. The people I speak of may spend an hour experimenting with new ways to tie their shoes, say, or following the tempestuous path of an ant along a crack in the sidewalk. You may find these people circling a tree for hours on end, pondering the twist of every branch. Many people would write them off as crazy and hasten their pace as they walked by, but in my younger years these people pricked my curiosity, and I found my pace slowing as I neared them, and then I would find myself sitting alongside them as they told me off their perspectives on life. And I must say I have had many intriguing conversations, and many confounding ones with these (smelly) people. I have noticed many of them have trouble with time and memory, always mixing the two up and confusing something twenty years ago as happening yesterday. Or wishing their past to merge again with their future; for time to repeat itself, for second chances, for love. The tree in front of them may not even exist in the now, but from the dredges of time they see it in front of them as something different, and cannot place their finger on what exactly it is...

Through eyes like these, colors bleed into eachother and the lines which were bold before become fuzzy. A person may start reliving their childhood mid-age, and in consequence cannot function as an adult in the adult world, and as a consequence cannot take things seriously anymore. They may find themselves sucking on stones--silly things which adults should not take any part in. But things like sucking on stones may be more than just acting like a child.Not only must these people ponder the meaning of things around them, they must also take these things into their mouths so they may taste them. And perhaps by tasting them, they understand the stones better than those who do not. They are placing thousands, millions of years upon their tongue. The memories, the pain of the earth is theirs to feel directly, to suck on. This is tickling down into the roots of things, not leaving them alone as most would do. Breaking the boundaries, you could say, of that which is expected of us. Searching out the meaning of meaning.

"Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition."

It is the eternal human condition that we be unable to understand, and that we still try, and language puts constraints on our ability to truly express ouselves. There is pain sometimes, and usually we find ourselves in a situation that reminds us, exactly to an uncanny degree, of a situation or a memory we have been in before. In these situations, I usually think of an imperfect crease in time. I know that I am not re-living my life in stupid circles. But at these moments, my hair stands on end and time seems to slow, caught red-handed at its devilish wiles. I realize then that I am a wanderer; I walk wild trails and cross streams, I follow the glow of the sunset day in and day out along barren mountain ranges. I walk a strait line, and still, sometimes I come to a place I have been before. I stumps me, and I stand there for years sometimes, wondering how I got there.

Do you see why I love Molloy? He is my soul-mate, my lost brother. In Ben Leubner's class we are reading Mody-Dick, and I have come across many passages that relate directly to this class, and a lot of stuff that reminds me of Molloy. I would love to quote many passages (call me Ishmael...) but I cannot do that to you. I have only one I think very important, and so very relevant to life. Here it is.

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings, but wherto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sight more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

Yes! This is like a fatalistic T.S. Eliot. It is Molloy. Only Molloy doesn't need to sail the ocean around the world in pursuit of his goal, he requires a smaller area. Molloy see the universe in a grain of sand. Every time he comes to the same place, he experiences it for the first time, and perhaps will always experience that place for the first time, for ever and ever. And this is how I want to live. In Speak, Memory Nabokov tells us:

The cradle rocksabove an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existinse is but a breif crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Is this true? From watching wanderers and vagabonds lovingly sniff flowers with an empty stomach, I think that something is speaking to them through the flowers and undeciphered stones. I would say all time, all memory is written, is re-experienced, and is remembered not only by us and our souls, but also by the plants and stones innocently surrounding us.

Random

I couldn't help noticing some similarities with this courses subjects and some writing in
a story I have just pulled out and started working on again, so I thought I'd put couple part is here:


One thing that makes me very sad is lost memories, or damaged memories. Some of mine I only see in little clips, and some of them I know are there, but still I won’t be able to bring them into my mind. It is like they are swimming around in a place where time stands still, teasing me with their scent and their touch. I remember the feeling of the memory, but not the memory itself. It’s like having a word at the tip of your tongue—so vivid you can taste it, and still it swims away. These are memories that are dying from my mind, and they hold the most pain with me out of all stages of memory and memories and thought. Perhaps because they leave their fragrance as they leave my mind, and their scent increases with distance. But all I have is scent. I cannot see the memories any more, but I can smell how sweet they are as they swim away. And that is like seeing bits and pieces of your life fade away from you, slowly and painfully—figures and familiar forms in picture albums erased entirely, without a trace. So that I can only fill in the blanks with stories, because I don’t like to leave things as blank. Empty memories terrify me. When I think about that empty space in my head suddenly I am standing on the edge of an incomprehensible cliff, and the distance of the ground sucks my breath away from me. Quickly I think of a strong, bold memory that is fresh in my brain as something to cling to and not be sucked down into quicksand. Because without my memories, there is nothing at all. Only this. You see than why my past has become my present, and also my future. My future is just a continuation of my past.

and a little later:


The sound echoed around the mountains many, many times. And with each time it grew more and more still, until the whole valley, even the mountains, were as still as death. And the most horrible thing was after the smoke cleared—it seemed a fog of smoke hung around me—after I could see, I saw only the horse running spooked across the beautiful golden plains while the rider hung dead from his saddle. The sky felt like was rushing down on me, so I ran away from it, away from the frightened horse and the dead man, away from the panic which threatened to grip my mind and my lungs and my whole body and squeeze like a vice grip until I popped. I pounded over the uneven ground as the grass grabbed my thighs and hissed like angry snakes, tripping and falling and clawing to get up. I wanted to leave it all behind me, everything including my soul, so that I would become a new person with a new life by the time I stopped. I wanted to leave my own self coughing and sputtering in the dust. So I ran harder and faster and more frantic than I have ever ran before, and I think than I will ever run again. The trumpets were sounding around the great walls which held my reality, my sanity in place and soon they would crumble like Jericho, as would the fragile mountains of this world. I ran and everything was fake to me, all made up including myself and the very life I lived. Underneath it all I waited for the ground to rip away like paper beneath my feet, and I would realize then that it had all been an illusion, tumbling into dark space. My feet pounded the earth, and pounded the earth and my bones were jolted so that I thought I would crumble on a step seven times too hard, shatter into a million pieces and blow away in the wind, on away the wind then would carry me, to heaven I hope. Or I would be caught in the sticky nectar of flowers or spider’s webs and just watch nature carry on without me…

Beckett as Biff

I've been sitting on some parts of Molloy that knock on the reader's head, like Back to the Future when Biff says "Hello, Mcfly, anybody home Mcfly?" Yes Biff Knocks on poor Michael J. Fox's head just like Molloy knocks on his mother's head.

The first I saw was on page 4:

Perhaps I'm inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that's the way it was.

I always have the urge to quote the entire page I am looking at when I do this. And also all the
"I don't knows" and It may have beens" and "I forgets" lends to the unsurety of the text, by the way.

Another (11):

And what do I mean by seeing and seein again? (Isn't that great!)
four sentences later:
I wonder what that means.

And later (24):

I got to my knees, no, that doesn't work,I got up and watched the little procession recede. I heard the shepherd whistle, and I saw him flourishing his crook, and the dof bustling about th herd, which but for him would no doubt have fallen into the canal.

And this (26):

Even farts made no impression upon it. (Absolutely gorgeous)

And, of course (30)

The house where Sophie--no, I can't all her that any more, I'll try calling her Lousse, without the Mrs.--the house where Lousse lived was not far away.

And (31)

Let's first bury the dog.

then this (41)

Mad words, no matter. For I no longer know what I am doing, nor why, those are things I understand less and less, I don't deny it, for why deny it, and to whom, to you, to whom nothing is denied?

then (45)

if such a thing is concievable, and such a thing is conceivable, since I conceive it.

and (51)

She had a somewhat hairy face, or am I imagining it, in the interests of the narrative?

I could go on with more but we all get the point: nothing. Nothing at all.

Rolling Stones

This passage from Molloy is beautiful, it may be my favorite:

This phenomenon, if I remember rightly, was characteristic of my region. Things are perhaps different today. Though I fail to see, never having left my region, what right I have to speak of its characteristics. No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far away. But this feeling was based on nothing serious, it was a simple feeling. For if my region had ended no further than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it changing slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed anything of the kind, but however far I went, and in no matter what direction, it was always the same sky, always the same earth, precisely, day after day and night after night. On the other hand, if it is true that regions gradually merge into one another, and this remains to be proved, than I may well have left mine many times, thinking I was still within it. But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said,
Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wherever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely. It would thus appear, if this is so, that my movements owed nothing to the places they caused to vanish, but were due to something else, to the buckled wheel that carried me, in unforeseeable jerks, from fatigue to rest, and inversly, for example. (60)

This part speaks to the restlessness of Molloy's soul, or of the human soul. Some of us may be constantly searching for something, yet unable to see it right in front of our own eyes. And it is beautiful, because that is life. We will never know the answers, so then it becomes about the journey in searching, and all the discoveries we make along the way, which of course will never answer our original question. We can never escape our own region, only watch it change with time.

On Waking

I like this line:

You don't remember immediatly who you are, when you wake. (33)

It reminds me of something, I just don't know what. It reminds me of everything. For Molloy, it may be he never remembers immediatly who he is. When I wake, I wake hard and rough. Every morning I have to put myself together again, or wait for myself to be whole again. I think a part of my mind is left behind in whatever dream I was dreaming when I was ripped away from that world. It is hard for me. I was once happy and cheerful upon awakening, and now, and now. In truth I want to keep dreaming, all the time, and I want my day to be whimsical like a dream. Is that selfish? When I open my eyes things are fuzzy and uncertain, as if they may at any moment simply fall through the floor and keep falling, all the way through the elastic earth and end up in someone's house on the other side. I think someday my dreams will be so deep and intense that they will suck me forever in, and no thing then could wake me.

Narcotics

I must say that I opened up Beckett with doubts in my mind. I am a novice in literature, and with Dr. Sexson feeding us the lie that we will not like Beckett, I was not entirely looking forward to reading him--and I mean that my stomach did not fill up with fluttering butterflies as it did prior to opening Nabokov. But once again I was decieved.

Exactly two sentences into Molloy, I whispered a freindly curse into the air and saw it flitter away, of course headed in the direction of that Old Proteus Dr. Sexson. Now I have seven lifetimes of study in front of me (Finnigins Wake is one of them), and in every one I sweat up steep mountains and slither through twisted caves, and stumble through choked valleys, only to find myself where I began. I say freindly curse because it had in it no hate, no malignant nature. It was a forehead-slapping, lightly chuckling curse which would only tickle or gently slap him--it wouldn't do any real harm.
No, it is a love-hate relationship I have with Dr. Sexson. He is my drug dealer. I need him more than he needs me. He dishes me out little samples here and there, and smiles, and always tricks me and teases me and keeps me on my toes. He is a trickster. Now he has given me a new drug to try--it is called Beckett, and it's reeelly good stuff, man. The only problem is, he gives me too much of it. I have stacked in my house mountains of drugs to consume, more than can be done in any lifetime, and he just keeps giving me more to pile on. And then he tells me to have it all done and sniffed up by the end of the week and I say

"Hey, man, I gotta take my time with this stuff. I gotta enjoy it.

rome wasn't built in a day, man."

We all, of course, know that the beautiful yarn he wove for us the last two days in class was all made up, all fiction. Dr. Sexson lives a fictional life and is therefore more real than any one of us. Or maybe not. Maybe it was real and Dr. Sexson encountered his Dopellganger upon that misty plane. Or maybe the old lady was a ghost. Perhaps the other passengers saw Michael talking and motioning as he sat alone in the seats, and they gave him wide berth. Perhaps, then and there upon that fictional plane, Dr. Sexson lived out a lifetime in twenty minutes--one filled with allegorical stories and death and the fight for life using an immortal tool of the Gods: stories. It is something to ponder.