My mental circus, inside and out.

The disease of admiration

"it is well nigh impossible," Gadsby was saying, "to gain access to the records of the Moorside Asylum.  The records of individual patients are protected in perpetuity.  I have no means of viewing the records of Samuel Marston Thicket, Boswell's mad tutor, that might shed light on Boswell's 'Lues Boswelliana,' his disease of admiration for Samuel Johnson.

Stroking his beard, Simon Chase replied, "The Hippocratic oath plainly states that the physician will protect the privacy of his patients and that medical information is to be treated as shameful."

"Yes, but it doesn't say how long."

"It never implies a statute of limitations on such information."

Hannah Fenstermacher leaned forward and spread her hands. "Remember, it also prohibits physicans from prescribing abortificants."

"That was the classical version," Chase said dismissively. "No physician takes that oath today."

"Precisely my point," Hannah said. "Even sacred oaths change according to the needs of the day."

"No historian can do a proper job of it without access to all relevant records," Scherzer argued. "Why keep records if one can never look at them.  The practices of history are difficult enough without these restrictions, and they should be open to all qualified researchers. A national research board should decide who might be qualified, since if the decision is left to the asylums, they will only protect themselves."

With these words, Scherzer had pleased all at the table.  He had given the nod to his new colleague, Gadsby, supported the sumptuous Hannah, and curried favor with Chase by engaging him in manly contest and proposing a fair outcome.  Further, he had implied his willingness to serve on any boards Chase might have in mind.  All jolly good.

"But Jacob," Hannah said, "You know the importance of privacy as well.  I am sure some of your records are secret.  For example the notes you kept on Miriam's private life that she asked you not to reveal.  I'm thinking of the son.  You hint at his fate, you toy with us, but you never reveal."

Cheeky, Scherzer thought.  He liked it.  With the exception of brief interludes with  the incest trauma victim Dorie and the businesswoman Germaine who thought he was cheap,  he had not had a steady partner in ten years. At every gathering, he was in the perpetually awkward position of searching for a single woman who was up to his standards and could see past his disheveled appearance.

To his left, Gadsby was making agitated motions.  He looked round to see the woman in cream standing behind him with a lost expression, holding a plate of pudding.  "You've taken Ms. Kennicut's seat," Gadsby said.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 30, 2005 21:45 | link | comments (4)

on we go

Scherzer considered himself a likeable fellow.  No one, as far as he knew, had any animosity towards him.  He was the very soul of collegiality.  While he wouldn't give anyone the shirt off his back, he knew how to throw a jolly  party.  He kept up on the latest novels and films, the artsy ones, and he knew which ones to choose by perusing the reviews in the Independent and the London Review of Books, which he read daily in the bath.  He chose restaurants only through recommendations from  guides or from people he thought were in-the-know. He was not the sort to spontaneously pick up a novel at Waterstone's or wander aimlessly through city streets in the hopes of stumbling across an eatery.   His was the life of the cultured man, a cautious life, but a friendly one.  All of his careful selections were designed to make him more likeable, with either a sense of equality among his peers or a subtle air of superiority over his inferiors, never  offensive or overdone, that earned him confidence and respect.

For these reasons, he could have sat at any table and been welcomed, he knew.  But Simon Chase, visiting colleague from Harvard, who worked on generational conflict in the postwar Soviet Union, 1945-1968, was waving him over, and that was a connection that was well worth cultivating.  With him was Hannah Fenstermacher, junior colleague, on a grant from the Germania Institute, who was studying humor, sexuality, and the body in the  Weimar Republic, heavily inflected with feminist poststructuralist theory, a method he could only pretend to understand.  She was casting him dark, smoldering looks, and for an instant he imagined her tight little  gymnast's body in chains before suppressing that thought.  Gasby was there, too, engaging a conversation about the implications of privacy ethics on the use of asylum records.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 27, 2005 21:01 | link | comments (2)

Digression

Scherzer entered the hall. . ...

I had hit a block here when I began to read Paul Ricoeur's Memory, HIstory, Forgetting.  In the first chapter, he discusses the entanglements of imagination and remembering.  In rational philosophy, imagination is considered to be on the "lowest rung of the ladder of modes of knowledge."  Memory occurs on a continuum from spontaneous remembering to "recall," which is a purposeful construction of memories, an imagining.  "To remember is to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory."   To set off in search of a memory is not as good because it is outside the body, in the realm of intellect in Cartesian dualism.  Ricoeur is explicating  this position to challenge it.

I have been considering this problem of memory as I think about fictionalizing the past.  I had set out to write a thinly disguised autobiographical account of 5 years in my recent history, not very far outside an adequate remembering.  But as I wrote, the pressure of the narrative, of art, of writing in the form of blog space, began to take over from memory.  Obviously, I was in a "seeker of memories" mode anyway, not writing down what I spontaneously remembered.  

My spontaneous memory, let's say of the conference dinner, which was actually a truncation of two events, is shaped by the way these memories were retained. M had a certain memory of the dinner (or was it lunch?) when we met, and he often liked to recall that I had pushed my food around on the plate in a finicky way. . I don't remember the food much at all, except that I remember passing through a cafeteria line, and that people were choosing the vegetarian dish, even though they hadn't ordered it in advance, to avoid having to eat the dry, withered looking ham slices. I vaguely rememberd a harried cafeteria worker in a white hair net, though I may be confused. . I don't at all remember my own eating.  What I remember is the feeling of sitting near M, who was aloof, and sitting back with his legs crossed.  That is the most salient, powerful memory of that moment.  However, because M was more vocal about his memories, I seem to now remember pushing bits of potato around on my plate, very uncharacteristic of me, since I usually eat heartily.

My memory is like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.  If I don't have a complete DNA strand, I add frog DNA so the thing can live.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 26, 2005 19:08 | link | comments (4)

Alma

[novel begins April 28 post]

Scherzer had been intercepted on his way to dinner by Alma McCoy, a frumpy American person with tangled grey hair and a multicolored jacket that seemed an outdated attempt at hipness.  As soon as she began talking, Richenbauer buggered off.  McCoy was, as she told Scherzer, an ethnographer working on the stadium bleacher collapse at Texas Panhandle University that had killed 10 students, and she had been involved in archiving and cataloguing the artifacts from the spontaneous memorials at the site, including small teddy bears, statuettes of Jesus, photographs, and class rings.  "What a brilliant presentation," she gushed.  "Just brilliant.  I loved the way you told Miriam's story.  So gripping.  I feel I want  to know her. And the cracks in the house.  What a brilliant metaphor.  Just brilliant.  I'm sure the book is fantastic.  How lucky Tichburne is to get you."

Scherzer chewed  the raw side of his thumb while she was talking.  He was not opposed to adoration.  He'd waited all his life to get the acclaim that was his due.  But such an open display of feeling disquieted him, made him feel that perhaps he didn't deserve all  this much worship.  He was much more comfortable with a cool analysis and a competition of ideas. He shuffled from one foot to the other.

McCoy leaned towards him and said conspiratorially, "But what about the son.  Why the suicide.  Was it the weight of the past?"

"We will never really know, but I've always thought so," Scherzer said. His hidden fear was that the suicide had nothing to do with the past.  Very cautiously and in extreme detail, he'd constructed history as a slender chain of causes and effects when an ungraspable complexity or even outright randomness might best explain some of the events he'd observed.

McCoy laid a hand on his arm.  She was very close. "I hope we'll work together sometime.  In the meantime, I'll look for your book."

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 23, 2005 20:37 | link | comments (1)

virgin saints

Gadsby laid his fork across his plate and launched into the story of  Miss Eva Lightbody, who, as a twelve-year-old child had been cast by her father into the fleshy arms of the indominatable Molly Brown, who reached out to catch her from an underpopulated lifeboat.  Lightbody had tucked her diary, more precious than any doll, into the bodice of her pinafore, and as Molly manned the oars, the girl had written down her sensations as she watched the huge ship heave up and slide into the waves, dragging her father with it.  Protected under the wing of Molly Brown, rescued and returned home to Brighton, Lightbody eventually became warden of the women's hall at Tichburne, the very building which was now Wickham Hall.  There she had lived a quiet spinster's life, eventually sharing a room with her maiden friend Lola Palazzo, a teacher who had fled fascist Italy rather than swear a mandatory oath of allegiance to Il Duce.  Here, Gasbdy stopped for a moment and looked meaningfully at Emma.  Yes, yes, she thought, so they were lesbians; get on with it.  In 1941, the Tichburne campus had been heavily shelled, a one-ton bomb falling near Wickham Hall that had swayed the buildng, blown its wooden doors off and shattered every window for ten blocks.  Under these perilous conditions, Eva and Lola had gone round the neighborhood to aid the wounded and merely frightened.  But they had been separated and poor Lola, shepherding a wounded child to safety,  had been brained by the falling bronze arm from a statue of King Edward VIII, that bloody Nazi sympathizer, astride his horse. After the tragedy, Eva Lightbody had gone into retirement, but had donated her childhood diary to the university archive.

"Wow," said Emma, like a typical idiot American.  With a story like that, she now found Gadsby quite tolerable. Tragedy, disaster, and survival: these were the elements of life she loved.  Not that she had ever experienced these things herself, having grown up in a remote Cleveland suburb and attended Catholic school where she was continually admonished to be quiet and cross her legs. These disciplinary efforts had only inflamed her desire to be noisy and uncross her legs, fueled by images of virgin saints put on the rack and boiled in oil.

[This novel begins April 28th posting]

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 21, 2005 22:51 | link | comments (3)