Landscape: Memory Read online

  But it was the last part that bugged me most: ". . . the very young and the very old have poor memories; they are in a state of flux, the young because of their growth, the old because of their decay." It was just like his mistake with buildings. In fact "the very old" have the best memories, the most cluttered and colorful and interesting memories. Just like old ruins holding more of the past. They are in a state of flux and will, I've found, often change their account of some past event, but always for the best. That is, the story gets closer to the truth, it's refined by their changes. That seemed to be the nub of it: this stuff from the book implied that any change in a person's memory would make that memory somehow worse, that memory should be a frozen, fixed thing, like a photograph.

  I thought of nurselogs. It was hard not to, what with "decay" and "growth" written right there next to each other on the page. It seemed fitting, the thought of those big trees, felled by age and their own weight, blown over and rotting. Their decay is what gives rise to new growth. All the sturdiest saplings, the healthiest of the young trees rise from those fallen, rotten giants. And I think memory could be like that. What seems to us to be decay could be growth. Maybe good memory isn't simply like a camera. Aren't photographs as smooth and frozen and finished as those thin plaster walls of the Fair? Aren't they just as flimsy?

  Duncan came back all dirty and breathless, dragging a bleached gray plank and sporting a willow wreath.

  "I've found treasures," he called across the clearing, beaching the wooden whale with a solid boom on the ground. "This isn't even the biggest." I came out, my bare feet tickled by the decaying pine needles carpeting the cool ground, and took a closer look.

  "Why'd you drag it all the way up here?" Our little yard seemed the wrong place to build a boat.

  "To show off," he explained, flexing his sweaty arm. "I wanted one for here. I'm going to carve a prow and take it down to the boat when I'm done." We stood above the prone prow, admiring its fine solid curve.

  "What else did you find?"

  "Lots. Flat planks, two-by-fours, all bleached out and worn. I found half a wreck too," he added, shaking my shoulder. "Most of the front's busted up but the back end's intact."

  "A trawler?" I asked, imagining something I'd never seen.

  "Nope. A rowboat," he corrected. "But a real big one, five feet from port to starboard, at least," and he stretched his arms as far as that.

  We went to the wreck first thing for exploring. It was up the east side of the lagoon, not far from where we swam, and partly sunk in mud. The dry stuff was great, shipshape and ghost-gray from the sun and salt. Where it got wet it crumbled rotten and soggy.

  Duncan and I started kicking it loose, breaking the wet wood off and tugging the rest out from its resting place, dragging it up onto the dry dirty slope that rose up along the lagoon. There was a good third of a boat there. Its rudder was strong and operable, screaming loudly from its rusty hinges as we tried it right and left.

  Scattered all along this same stretch were scraps of boards and huge twisted gnarls of trees washed in on storms. It must be from the logging, I thought. They take the trees down off the hills and float them off to sea. If storms wreck the barges, you get trees, whole and in parts, riding through the waves and washing up all along the coast, even dragging in on the lagoon. I nestled into the lap of a big mess of roots, sitting back into a hollow where the wood reached out in a tangle, now washed clean and smooth by the battering waves.

  "Tree house," Duncan punned.

  "Root cellar," I replied. "Only a buck fifty." Duncan squeezed in by me. "This could be the captain's bridge."

  "Or the crow*s nest," Duncan suggested. "I'll put it up top, on the mast." I imagined us hoisting the grotesque tangled roots by ropes and pulleys, dragging the ugly bulk up a tall thin mast.

  "Your rowboat's got a mast?" I asked, teasing him.

  He shook his head no. "I thought I'd try to make a sail. Something very simple, but one where we wouldn't have to row." He looked out across the water, its face all rippled by the strong breeze. "Your dad's got tools, and I've got plenty of time."

  We explored along the east side, past the gullies of our earlier summers, and on to the mouth of the lagoon. The current drew strong out to sea through the narrow channel there, with Bolinas just a stone's throw away. We didn't try to cross, knowing we'd probably end up somewhere out in the freezing waves. We raced back for lunch, getting hungry and sweaty and tired and found Father and Flora setting out big bowls of cold potato soup. After, we swam first and then we napped.

  I took my drawing kit with me south along the shore, watching Duncan running off ahead, disappearing around a bend, off to Stinson Beach or Half Moon Bay or Mexico or however far his legs could take him in two hours. I walked as far as Weeks Gulch and turned to look out at the actual setting of the memory I'd been trying to paint, afraid of what I might see. There were, it appeared, some problems. The painting I'd made was markedly different from what lay before me. The beautiful hills I'd drawn were much higher and their descent to the water much sharper than what was there now. The lagoon itself—that is, the lagoon in front of me—spread out farther and into more mysterious nooks than I could find in the lagoon I had drawn. The position of the sun was impossible.

  All in all I found my painting a good sight more satisfying than the actual landscape. I had several choices and I faced them boldly. I chose to make excuses and go with my aesthetic impulse. My impulse was to leave my work as it was and forge ahead. My excuse was that my memory was more like a nurselog than a camera. I was remembering the trouble I'd had with Cicero. If he was right, if my memory ought to be an accurate replica of the original experience, if that was so, my painting was hopelessly inaccurate. It was a bad painting of a fuzzy memory. But I preferred to think that memory is never frozen, nor should it be. My painting was a successful rendering of the dynamic memory that had simply begun with the original event. It accurately captured the decaying grotesque of memory that lay rotting in my head, that fallen nurselog out of which so much of value must be growing. My painting, I figured, was so very accurate in its depiction of this memory that it would inevitably look wrong when compared to the original model.

  I packed my little kit and walked back toward home feeling glad I'd come to look. Several loose ends had now been tied up neatly, thanks to this dilemma, and I was confident my picture might eventually turn out right. I had trouble keeping my complicated conclusions straight, so I kept repeating them, like an incantation, as I walked, and jotted them down straightaway in the front flap of Mr. Spengler's book. I sat out in the soft cool dirt and looked into the trees, trying to put my thoughts straight, scratching and scribbling and reworking till they were clear. And that's how you see them here.

  * * *

  We all four swam in a beautiful small pond Father led us to up the road going north from the lagoon, up closer to Dogtown. It was a watering hole for cattle and horses dug by some ambitious farmer who hoped to save himself running the cows off to the neighbor's hole. All pristine clean and blue from the sky, thick green grass snuffling up to its edges and big broad oaks gathered in a shady group on its southern side. We wore costumes, I'm glad, as I'm not too keen to swim naked with Father and Flora both. Flora alone is something new for me and a bit of a shock. The water was a good sight warmer than the lagoon, and clear and fresh, leaving no salty traces on the skin.

  Tonight we're going during mischief time to ask if we may tie a rope swing up into one of the trees. Father says there's rope and I fancy making this our morning, afternoon and evening spot, rather than tromping down to the salty brine each time.

  Dinner was exquisite. Father roasted beef and I drowned it in a horseradish-soured-cream sauce. Mr. Squashtoe said yes, we may tie a rope swing but we weren't to tell any other kids, or otherwise attract gangs, and we spent the rest of the evening digging out ropes from this or that hidey-hole where Father had stashed them and tying them into a suitable length. I am sleepy and it's just past te
n. I see Duncan out there in the dark dropping his ghost-white shirt and climbing into bed.

  22 JUNE 1915

  We swam at Squashtoe's pond today, morning, noon and night. It was the same as yesterday. Flora, Duncan and me naked in the morning, Duncan and me after lunch, and then all four of us in costumes before dinner. The rope swing is a great success, reaching back to a big high branch in an oak, and swinging out a good twenty feet over the pond and ten or fifteen feet high (if you give it a good swizz of the hips). Father even tried it, though he dropped in with his nose plugged, which gave the whole feat a comic effect. Plop and bubble, dropped like a rock into the water.

  Yesterday I thought I'd come to a good position, giving up a bit on my hope to remember right. Not exactly that, more giving up on the idea that a "photographic" memory is a right memory, I'd decided my memory was like a nurselog in glorious decay, full with mysterious small saplings of unquestionable value. It was a seductive thought, given my love of the woods and the neat way it allowed me to justify my painting. It was so enormous and fragile, that thought. I carried it back home in my head like an overgrown exotic flower, some incredibly lush thing on the verge of falling apart. It held together, so long as I didn't touch it.

  But the closer I get to it, the more carefully I inspect it, the more it makes my head spin. If all memories decay, what of them will really ever be left? What is it that's growing from out of the rotting material of old memories? Is every moment of the past simply done and gone forever? Why can't they be held intact somehow? It made me light-headed and nervous, like I'd peered in too close and the flower had engulfed me. I had nightmares of heavy lumber shifting, and walls collapsing down into ruins.

  So today I read more Cicero, to try and find some solid ground. Cicero says that I'm simply suffering from a disorganized intellect. My distaste for his rigorous model is just a form of laziness. His diagnosis is reassuring. A competent doctor was just what I needed. He even prescribed a cure.

  The Ad Herennium offers a demanding system to help train the untrained mind (like mine). It involves a regimen of memorization and the placement of "loci" and "images" on a sort of matrix formed out of a building or a plot of land, a landscape. As I understand it (with Flora's help), the student is to choose a familiar place to memorize, a house or building or landscape that is small enough to be thoroughly remembered, yet large enough to hold many distinct "loci." Loci are the separate locations in the place that's been memorized. For example, if I used the cabin as a matrix, our bed and Flora's bed and the door and the table and the funny stool could all be loci. To remember accurately, then, I must associate all of the "images" of the topic to be memorized with all of the loci.

  "Images" are the details of whatever it is you want to memorize. To memorize "today" maybe I'd assign each hour to its own locus. The image of eight o'clock a.m. would be lumped onto our bed. Why not? And nine o'clock, say, on Flora's bed. And on and on. To recover the whole day, I simply "walk through" the cabin in my head and pick up each image as I pass its locus, missing no detail whatsoever because I've so thoroughly memorized the matrix, that is, the cabin.

  It's sort of like Ruskin, but for memory.

  I find the possibility attractive. If I put my mind in order, each part will take its proper place and the stuff I now let myself lose and forget would instead stay present to mind, set in its proper place where I can find it. If I follow the steps, working hard and getting them right, I'll not have to worry about everything slipping away like water and vapors. I'll not have to make excuses.

  Duncan's drawn his grand plan, a twelve-foot dinghy with a flat sloping front and no point in the prow, save the decorative extension he's carving out front. The mast will stand six feet up and there'll be no jib.

  The afternoon was wicked warm, no breeze blowing and the sun burning down hot as dust, making the woods smell sweet. We stayed at the pond right through from lunch to dinner, me sketching there and Duncan swimming laps in lieu of running. Also we fooled around, back among the trees, and this time I made Duncan lie down still all naked and glistening with water droplets and I knelt over him and ran my two hands slowly over his body, up across his soft brown chest and shoulders, my fingers across his lips, and down over his taut smooth tummy and along his thighs and on their insides and I took his penis all warm and bursting deep down into my mouth and more and again, making him stay lying still and working my hand up under his butt and back and I sucked and sucked so hard and lovely until he came all hot and liquid in my mouth and him in ecstasy groaning loud and long and flexing his body all strong and muscular and breathing so hard and deep and then reaching his arms way up over his head, him all stretched out and his back arched high so he was just pushed deep into my mouth and he came, like I said. He lay there all limp and dead to the world, but squeezing my hand so hard it hurt, and I just lay in the grass beside him for the longest time. And then we swam some more.

  For mischief we walked along the road to town and peeked in the windows of the local bar. It was past dark by the time we came over the hill and down onto the small peninsula where Bolinas is. We had no trouble sneaking about the bushes outside and hoisting up into a strong hedge. Inside the men were just sitting around with drinks, talking. It was nothing at all.

  23 JUNE 1915

  Beautiful this morning, with low clouds slipping in across the water, turned orange and golden by the early light. Wispy and more like a sunset than most sunsets here. We had apple pancakes, nearly drowned in butter and syrup, and coffee that could kill a horse. I made the coffee.

  Flora took the stage back to the city to get her camera. Her mother dropped a line saying okay and off she went the first chance she got. She's going to begin with landscapes and portraits, and if she likes that, Father says later on he'll help her try taking pictures of animals and birds.

  I'm making pictures and she'll be taking pictures. What does that mean? Who does she take hers from? What do I make mine of? Can I take a painting? Can she make a photograph? We make up the oddest ways for saying things, or we take them up.

  How am I in my landscape, if I'm the one looking?

  I worked on Duncan's boat today. We floated boards in the bay, testing them for buoyancy. We've got one board almost a foot across and four inches thick. We had hold of it, standing waist-deep in the brisk salty water, when two great herons landed on its far end and stood poking their beaks about into air, looking back at us all crazy in their eyes like idiots, their fleshy pouches flapping in the breeze, jerking their necks around like a pair of spastics trying to yawn.

  We thought we'd be smart and push them out to sea and we did, giving the board a good sturdy shove and grinning with mischief as they floated out into deeper water. Of course we'd forgotten that birds fly and after a pleasant cruise they flapped their heavy wings and drifted off across the open waters. Our best lumber lay floating out toward the middle of the lagoon until finally Duncan dunked in and swam to its rescue.

  Father left this note today, folded and set like a bookmark in Cicero. "Watching ships at sea one marvels at the simplicity of their design. A boat need simply hold air. It is just a shell placed in water. Containment, separation. The boat is an indentation riding across the ocean's top. Words cross my mind, ships passing, pressing their particular indentations into my soft surface, containment, separation. What cargo do they carry, what path to take? I'm swimming toward the shore, a shell placed in water, simply holding air."

  24 JUNE 1915

  All our explorations, it has developed, take us, just before lunch, through town where we watch the arrival of the stage from Sausalito and see if anyone's sent us mail that day. Today, of course, Flora was aboard, burdened with boxes and bags full of fragile camera parts and bearing notes for all of us from Mother and Mr. Taqdir. Flora was effusive, as always, hugging and kissing and parceling out bundles to whoever might take them as she climbed down from the coach. We'd brought Father's little wooden cart on wheels for her things and for milk and butter from
Mr. Macken.

  "I simply must have a swim" was what she said first. "I'm filthy from head to toe," and then she kissed us again.

  After dinner Duncan took me to a field of rye up past the canyons at the far end of the lagoon. There was fog floating in and the sun had gone down, sunk below the hills, so I imagined we were in Belgium, lost behind the lines. The rye stretched out into the mists all dull and dirty green, obscured by the luminous fog and waving ever so slightly. Sounds carried in close to our ears, coming from mysterious sources, invisible and directionless. A cow came running through the field, passing by us four feet away and disappearing into the clouds. We rustled through the tall grass slowly, going in no particular direction, listening to the cow's woeful mooing. The dusk was settling in and a boat motor chugged low and steady, within reach of our hands it seemed from the sound. But no boat could be seen, nor the water nor the flapping sail that sounded, moving across from our right to our left and disappeared into the eerie calm. We wandered, I felt, forever, until the moon came clear and the field opened up in pale silver light and we walked out, only a few dozen yards from the water, and went down the dirt road home.

  25 JUNE 1915

  It was gray today, morning, noon and night. Low fog at either end and thick stormy clouds all through the middle. Duncan went down to work on his boat despite the cold, all bundled in his sweater and a floppy felt hat Father gave him. I read.