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Memory Gardens

Ryan Nowlin

Memory Gardens Once, if my memory serves me correctly, my life was a surfer’s paradise where all the waves broke over me like a secret garden not easily entered I felt a mild and charged inclination to weep as though floating over a pin cushion of nothingness. Awash with the sound of the petal steel guitar itself a Rubik’s cube of an instrument so many things could go wrong. I’ve always wanted to read that gargantuan novel that put Hawaii on the map or see how Gargantuan lived his life or read Proust’s books arranged by color, evenly spaced on my book shelf. You could live and die between those books. Among the loveliest aspects of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time I’d include the mauve September sea color of a favorite scarf or the little patch of yellow wall from Vermeer’s View of Delft that wedges a splendid sun-drenched town house roof between shaded walls, a trivial detail for some, but when all is said and done, like Bergotte, we all have a version of the painting (Bergotte then dies after seeing the clouds one last time, an opacity on the horizon.) Will Swann move in with Odette or remain in the suburbs, where grand old houses are hidden by a cross-hatch of leaves? That’s where I stopped reading. Anyway, who reads Proust all the way through? (Some prefer the cut the crap, no nonsense world of Charlus, though Proust leaves him none the wiser, even sadder). The clink of a spoon against a plate after the aperitif or the feel of a napkin on Marcel’s lips may have evoked the plumage of an ocean green and blue as a peacocks’ tail. My summer reading list goes on and all around its margins lies the gulf between me and the world or a new category representing the adventitious. This is an account of the rugged turn into the past, what may be available to all. All understand the magic regarding what is open to one in the repetition, but as you are here we can begin. You are in depth person, proud and sad with a face for all weathers and seasons. Let me enlarge on that later. Omlagus Gargungiloops
or You’ve been Exploding Frogs Again was something I first heard in my girlfriend’s dorm room in the early 90s. I had not heard anything like it before and it definitely was not on the usual play list at the time. Then I learned about the infamous Throbbing Gristle and its subsequent splinter bands like Coil, Psychic TV and Chris and Cosey and Death in June and Current 93 All these bands formed a pink light underground in North Carolina. This strange business of invention could result in amorphous gnat clouds, words in shade, kinetic plush hum, a crash of internalized peristaltic process, exteriorcoruscations,zenthings. Asacrocodile’ssnoutissofter than a lover’s finger tips, so too would Yayai Kusamaa and Joseph Cornell talk on the phone, and she would say, “Joseph, I have to go now, and he said “No, Yayoi, just put the phone down and I’ll wait for you to come back” So Yayoi would go out, completely forget about him and come back a couple hours later, find the phone on her bed, pick up and Joseph would say, “Hi Yayoi...” This story of their relationship is of course: H + = Hear, or Here + Say= hearsay I find myself pitted against my own d+ Adjacent to or to the side of is the running theme of what I am doing now in my writing which helps me out of sentimentality. Recently I have only read journals as a record of a mind thinking rather than a means by which to develop new verbal constructs that aren’t so deliberately devised. Class knowing consciousness is knowing what side of the fence you are on. K+ Class analysis is figuring out who is there with you.
My Gilberte would be Trollie Gray with whom I associate most of my memories of my youth in Frankfurt and Albertine as the elusive and sophisticated Alex Williams who sat next to me in Mrs. Thomas’s honor’s English class where we learned of nature versus man, man versus society (American versus German) the cathedral-like structure of the highly educated girl versus someone down to earth. Once I invited Alex Williams over to Trollie’s house in Gross Gerrau and we went second hand shopping. I remember the look of horror on Alex’s face as Trollie began to sort through all the clothes bins looking for a pretty blouse. (Alex’s mother was an owner of a clothing boutique) A few islands of camaraderie and friendship appeared on the metro, on an elevator, in a crowd not so much as touching a shoulder in the fall of 1987 at the age of 15 when I chanced upon meeting a Parisian/ English girl named Katie Follain. I met her through my roommate Peter Matheos. We went with Katie and her friend Oria to a restaurant near the Parc Zoologique While we were walking in the rain with Oria and Katie Follain a feeling of infatuation overcame me like the faint crackling of feathers under finger tips and opium tea. Well, I’ll tell you very honestly, Katie said, I felt like taking you by the arm and talk with you for ages as when Newton lassoed the moon to the earth, then when you sang How Beautiful You Are by The Cure S+ 👄 Slippage of forgetting I nearly kissed you . Maybe I shouldn’t really tell you this because you will start thinking things, but on that day I was very happy.

Work from Tracing Political Commitment: A Writing Workshop with Corina Copp

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