What is ‘doublethink’? Here we go. I feel as if I’m committing myself to these ideas forever, because I was just reading in the NY Times Magazine that once this goes on the Internet, I can never take it back. I feel that I will never be allowed to change my mind again, and yet every now and then I have a HUGE new thought and everything before is jostled around and has to adjust.
Before I get into ‘doublethink,’ I would like to give an example of what I just said. For years, I’d been relaxing on my floor trying to figure out how to do ‘sense memory’ or ‘sensory recall.’ I’d read about it and had a few classes. So one day I was concentrating on one of the ‘major monologues’’ I was trying to break into – I think it was Celia from T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party - rather like a two-year-old trying to outsmart the security system Fort Knox.
Here is the passage.
Celia
I’m not sure, Edward, that I understand you;
And yet I understand as I never did before.
I think-I believe-you are being yourself with me.
Twice you have changed since I have been looking at you.
I looked at your face: and I thought that I knew
And loved every contour; and as I looked
It withered as if I had unwrapped a mummy.
I listened to your voice, that had always thrilled me,
And it became another voice-no, not a voice:
What I heard was only the sound of an insect,
Dry, endless, meaningless, inhuman-
You might have made it by scraping your legs together-
Or however it is grasshoppers do it. I looked,
And listened for your heart, your blood:
And saw only a beetle the size of a man
With nothing more inside than what comes out
When you tread on a beetle.
(Edward
Perhaps that is what I am
Tread on me if you like.)
Celia
No I won’t tread on you.
That is not what you are. It is only what was left
Of what I had thought you were. I see another person,
I see you as a person I never saw before.
The man I saw before he was only a projection-
I see that now-of something that I wanted-
No not wanted-something I aspired to-
Something that I desperately wanted to exist.
It must happen somewhere-but what, and where is it?
And I ask you to forgive me.
I went about it doggedly, deciding exactly what it was I was looking for – which is the first terrible mistake, when rooting around in the unconscious. If one tells the unconscious what to do – well, it won’t. I lay there, eyes screwed tightly shut, desperately hoping the phone would ring and free me from this hopeless task. The grocery list for the day kept running through my brain, enumerating items to which others needed to be added – how I itched to get up and write down, brie, herring and whipping cream – and when I finally pictured the man of the moment who was currently breaking my heart and with whose bug-like qualities I was already familiar, I couldn’t for the life of me focus on his cold hazel eyes that turned my flesh to melting butter.
Here was a problem I hadn’t thought of before: I, as Celia, am angry at one particular moment – I mean how could you call someone an insect if you weren’t in a rage – but then a few lines later I assumed I’d have to be sad and if I could work it up, crying – although that would be really asking too much - because I realize that Edward is just a projection of someone else. Who might that be? Celia ultimately gets herself crucified upside down on an anthill, so her projection must have to do with Christ, but that certainly wouldn’t work for me – although, as a child, I had a rather unhealthy fascination with Joan of Arc.
I went to sleep for a few minutes. When consciousness returned, I still had more time on the clock. I had made it a fast rule that I would attempt sense-memory, whatever happens, or usually doesn’t happen, for at least one half hour four times a week. So instead of jumping up and rushing off to Zabar’s, I stayed on the floor, noticing that my body was considerably more relaxed and I was breathing in a deeper way. The heat of summer permeated my cells and set my nerves aquiver with unexpected expectation. I stopped thinking about other things and my mind stayed with my body. The traffic on Columbus Avenue purred, punctuated by an occasional acceleration and a faintly sweet aroma emanated from a vase full of lilies, just past their prime.
Without the usual wriggling around, I found myself transported to my childhood bedroom, looking out my window at the road as I had day after day in those early years, and again so many times before during these fruitless sessions, chasing after my own ghost. But with the effort gone, I almost took pleasure in smelling the metal of the old, bellied-out screen, running my hands over the pitted, dirty paint of the sill with its own musty odor. To the left, I regarded the lonely boat yard filled with half-finished shells of vessels that would never see the water, and those whose extensive damage meant they would never return to the sea. I listened to the occasional old geezer hammering a nail, the sound reverberating in my ear like the shimmering heat of late afternoon. Then bird song cut across the landscape with its yearning – or maybe rage at finding a rival mating in its place. The leaves in the pear tree just outside the window rippled in the humid breeze, revealing their silver backs, suggesting an evening thunderstorm. Loneliness taking root in my solar plexus sent me suddenly to the mirror to contemplate the indented crisscross pattern the screen was pressing onto my nose.
Back at the window again; I now realize the fluttering in my solar plexus is actually dread. I would like to withdraw from but by continuing to breathe instead of tensing, I find my gaze extending towards the road, beyond our lane and into the back yard of the1781Coffin House, its snowy clapboards and fiercely green shutters competing for supremacy with the trees, who’ve stood their ground for even more hundreds of years. For a moment, I study Fred Noone’s wondrously groomed lawn – Carrie, his wife is the Coffin, a staunch member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Every flower seems ordered to grow upon each particular stem, in stark contrast to my grandmother’s rioting rose bushes and patches of intensely blue irises rudely jostling at the borders of the new mown lawn that looks like a bad haircut.
The flowers and the freshness of cut grass threaten to overwhelm me with their obscenely romantic odors. At the time I have regressed to, I’m too young to know romance, but the feeling I have, the longing, reflects itself in the wantonness of my grandmother’s permissive upkeep of her garden progeny. The day is passing;, evening, mauve and shadowy, creeps closer and the salty evening breeze of a velvety, summer night along the river entangles itself with the flower drenched air.
I find myself watching Ferry Road – before the bridge there was a ferry connecting Rings Island to Newburyport on the other side the Merrimack River, the only route to Boston and points south if you lived along the shore. My eyes kept veering left just before the road disappears behind Pike’s square white wooden residence at the top of a small hill. Why did my eyes never go to toward the right where the road went North toward Salisbury, the most northeastern town in Massachusetts with New Hampshire just beyond. This question lingered in my mind as I watched the twilight deepen; in a moment it would be night and the this day’s opportunity would have passed forever.
What opportunity? I was jolted out of my reverie, and at that moment I understood what I was reaching for – but without consciously reaching, just following the uninterrupted thread of memory. I saw it; the ‘imagining’ of those endless days and evenings, when I leaned against the windowsill and gazed at the road beyond. I was waiting for my mother, not in the abstract, but very specifically, waiting for an open car, touring cars they used to call them, and there she would be in her movie star clothes flanked by movie star moguls, slithering past the Pike’s, and turning into Coffin’s lane, waving regally to Mr. Noone, and finally rounding the corner to stop beneath my window. She’s back, she’s forgiven me for driving her away when I was four and not interesting enough to make her hang around. We’ll go away now, together, and I won’t be a prisoner of her absence any more.
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