Category Archives: Reminiscence

I wanted to write about this event in a movie I had seen as a preliminary commentary about the essay to follow, but it has slipped my mind and I am chattering now on screen in the weak hope it may re-emerge. The felt-sense of this reminiscence I can feel right now but cannot access and put into words goes along this line: I am trying to recreate something from the past, something nostalgic — and what nostalgia means is much more complex than a dictionary meaning contains. Nostalgia, I suppose for me, is a returning to the scene of the “crime,” much as we know that some criminals have to return to the the place they commited their criminal acts. It is no longer a curiosity but a fact and part of being human, I guess, as returning to the old neighborhood or being at a high school reunion for a class decades past in one’s youth. I will continue buzzing along here as that ineffable metaphor I was going to use for your benefit eludes me; as soon as I get it, I will stop and insert it into this blog.

As one ages, as I grow old, the old truth holds true, that we come closer to our childhood as we come closer to our death. (In America we “pass,” for me I “die.”) Like Kane, there are several snowglobes in my memory banks, holographically fading in and out, mnemonic human plasma seeking shape, substance and form. I think there is a feeling of recapture and reclaiming in all this, for I would dearly love to possess the phonograph, made in Switzerland, I was gifted with as a child and played all kinds of records on it. It was a mechanical marvel, so well lathed, blue in color, and all parts trued and  fit squeakingly well into a self contained case, for part of the joy was in removing the arm and the needle and returning all that once again after play was over. It was compact and well-machined, beautiful machinery, much as we look back at Smith Coronas, Olympias, and Hermes typewriters. In this culture we ride the wild mustang of change, and we are told this is in and new, this is out and passe and like lemmings we follow. I associate to the phonograph once again and I see it as a foreshadowing of what I did in my thirties, admire the stereo system more than play it.

I recall playing Al Jolson records on it, that gravelled voice, a cantor’s voice; Bozo the Clown and some 45s of classical music which I played over and over, some motifs, I imagine, sticking to my germ plasma as a child. It was a wind-up phonograph with a heavy metal device that held the needle, almost as thick as a tapered nail. It did its job well and everything else didn’t matter to my child’s mind. Cartridges and needles, anti-skating devices and all the rest of the gibberish would come later as I tried on some nether level to replay the childhood experience I had as a child before 1950. And now I am repeating all over again: I miss taking out a record from its sleeve, embracing its curved edges between both palms in order to read Side A and then flipping it to read Side B, a  forgotten gesture as ancient as holding one’s hands up for mother to wind wool into hanks of wool or being told to get off a man’s fender or playing stoop ball with a Spaldeen.

Of late one snowglobe in mind has been the stereo sytem I had in the 70s. This, as I am reading, was the Golden Age of such sonic components. I remember, on my small budget, reading stereo magazines to create the possible audiophile dream of a system. Finally, I remember buying an AR (Acoustic Research) turntable which is now considered  a classic; it was a manual, for I did not mind to get off my ass and change the record. And it was thought that automatic changers dropped records unnecessarily harshly onto the platter — what nonsense, I now think. In any case I paid about $78 for this masterful turntable. On EBay it goes for so much more as people are now returning to re-establish vintage systems. Additionally I read more and paid an exorbitant amount of money, for the 70s, for an Acoustic Research receiver which is now a rare classic.  Evidently I had good taste, like keeping a ’65 Mustang in the garage for decades — which I did not do! So I was building my dream system; I always had shit speakers, for bucks were always an issue. Years later I remember discarding the AR only to see it in a stereo store in upstate New York  — decades later –going for the same price I purchased it new. I had moved to CDs, like many of us, and that is regrettable.  Like Odysseus tied to the mast, I heard the sirens of change..

I went on a lark, for a lark for any old man, which I am, is to reestablish something indefinable, a denial of death, perhaps. All the equipment I  bought comes from the 70s and 80s when two channel stereo was at its peak. Going to EBay I purchased a Pioneer turntable for under $50 and an integrated Harman Kardon amplifer for about $65 and then bought a small collection of classical albums, near mint, as they say, for about $65 Ravel, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.  Scouring Craigslist and EBay, I am now seeking bookshelf speakers. All the old names are revisited — JBL, Bose, Kenwood, Acoustic Research, still around after allthese decades. I bought a wicker stand for the components and when all of them are at hand I will read the owner’s manuals and sort it all out; the perfectionism has abated and all I want to do Is play with records and hear some good music. Additionally I am moved to buy some of the dear albums I cherished in the late 60s and throughout the 70s — Revolver, Wildflowers, Mother Earth, Sgt.Pepper, Rubber Soul, Hair, Bridge Over Troubled Water, et al. Reminiscences of Richie Havens, Cream, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night waft through my brain. I gave all them away, you know, like train sets, baseball cards, the memorabilia of childhood. I missed the album cover drawings and the lyrics, in large print, inside. I missed my past, that which I can never regain but that which still abides and resides in me, for the past does not exist — the past is the present, ask Proust, ask Faulkner, ask a highly skilled shrink.

I self-observe myself returning to earlier times perhaps as an attempt to self-soothe who I am, for it is harmless, a hobby with ancient antecedents. I seek not to stave off the advance of change, for change is a consequence of human interactions without any coherent, overall design. Change is human woodpecking. I am into recovery, that recovery which makes one sensitive and overtly feeling and softened by memories which are often overpowering and dearly cherished as part of one’s esential exisential self. It is the essence that precedes existence. In this search for the recoverable past once more I attempt to define who I am.

What should I do? Look forward, I think not. Forward is the end. I think back and what that entails is recollection and reminiscence. memories and the sisters regret and ruefulness. The present is in disarray, for the dust has not settled, just the eye of the storm crossing self-geography. I associate to a dim memory in sixth grade in which I wrote down the year 2000, for it was 1952. I imagined for a moment what it would be like to be 60, just for a moment. I shot ahead, I shot back to ’52 and I went on. The memory trace stays and what it means is open to all kind of interpretations, choose what you like. I like the thought that I was imagining old age while all the time relishing and reveling  that I was 12 — and all those years in between — and could not be 60 if I tried to be. I was exploring the future, making tense work for me, given the allowance of so many years ahead to live and be alive, although by 12 I was pretty much dead to myself. And now I look back to 1952 — Truman, H-bombs, Mccarthy, Brando, the Brooklyn Dodgers and especially Jackie Robinson, with that steatypygous high stance of his, and cherry lime rickeys. It is always striking what we remember, what we force ourselves to remember, what floats in that computer which is our mind that does not often allow for deletions.  I think we become human dustballs, gatherers, collectors, aimless as we drift hither, thither, terrain scramblers, sagebrush. Human experience as accretion.

It is very bright in my office now. The Nevada day is starkly brilliant so that in some odd way I find it hard to focus or to write and my mind wanders, the above paragraph is such an association and so I will follow it as I laze and meander down by the riverbanks of who I am, where water touches soft mud and the reeds. As I look back I remember a program last night on Reagan. One of his biographers said that he had no friends and his son confirmed that, for whatever reasons, although the first decade of his life was difficult, an alcoholic father and  failed businessman and a religious evangelical for a mother. Reagan is not the issue here; what I identified with was that he had no friends, acquaintances, yes, but no childood “Chum,” as the therapists would term it. I can think of only two friends, long since gone out of my orbit, who I had a relationship with. So, I know I can do that, or have that, but I went off by myself and essentially became my own friend, for there was no one else there. I befriended me. I am a loner and it has its satisfactions and its costs. I can confide in me, I can confide in Jane, and sometimes, perhaps, I wonder if I need another for a well-rounded opinion or assessment, but I choose not to have that. I am “sociable,” not an isolate, but I am of two minds about having a close friend and not having one. I am much more interested, given my character, to examine why this has come about than to run out and become an American and load my Facebook page with “friends.” Oh well, the short answer is that I do not trust, for that would bespeak vulnerability and that has been latently scary for me all my life.

I believe we never reach that imaginary state in which we are “grown up,” for that never occurs — and how boring that would be! –even until the evening before we die. Assuredly, we are never in conrol of anything, even our bodily functions press us into action. Humorously, homo sapien acts and behaves as if values and systems and religious beliefs (Omigod!) give us “security” and purpose. So skewed and mistaken as a  mindset. We are all in a spin, in a twirl and tizzy and somehow manage to keep the species extant.  In short, all the psychoanalytic thinking, self-reflection, self-knowledge, guru-izing and musing will not satisfy me as to why I end up without a close friend. Whose life is it? I can say decidedly — someone has to do that in this blog — I had no hand in all this except the hand that rules all of us, the unconscious mind, that thing we run from and even if we met up with it could not handle its drives (pun intended).

Controlled by the invisible hands of evolution and gravitation, throw in the unconscious as the other known force that kicks the shit out of us. The unconscious rules. As I come down to it, as the pencil is whittled more and more, I reflect over the different selves I have lived, perhaps experienced and, of course, there are scant answers for the questions intrigue me much more. I am just taken with the idea that I will become vaporized, an exhalation of decades and then a snuffing out. This yardstick we are given in years genetically, the measure of thousands of experiences, the learnings accrued, the insights kept and savored amount to a hill of beans. Why be upset? Nothing can be done about it. But I sense, as you do, a kind of profligacy on the part of nature; however, how else will evolution mutate, eternally forever?

Allow me to struggle here about what I intend, behind or under the words, I present to you. After all this sound and fury which often signifies nothing, in moments of self-reflection, for that, to me, is our greatest gift as as species — the possibility of the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti said it, what is to be made of all this life and living, these relationships, the cacophony of the culture and global world about us?

I think I find respite, only that, no more, in acknowledging the present moment more and more as if I could drop dead at any time which is what I would whisper into the ear of any acute young person starting out on his earthly trek. No cliches here about the present as evinced in therapies and philosophies, the croakings of Dr, Phil, Chopra and Dyer, the three Stooges. At 70 I am looking at the now, at the moment, and I have a whole ball of wax which is my past, often given to me, often unlived, often unaware of until I reached this time. I associate to the old story about Alexander the Great when he came upon the Gordian knot. Told by the Indian mystics that India would belong to the conqueror who could unravel the knot, Alexander descended from his horse, Bucephalus, withdrew his sword and cleaved through the knot to the amazement of onlookers. Of course, this is, to my mind, the distinction between the western and eastern worlds, doers versus thinkers; both have their merits.

So I look at my Wellsesian snowglobe, turn it upside down, and as the snowflakes in solution float down I try to see what fixture is at the center of it all, no not a sled, but what characterological self is there that absorbs all the flakes, wondrous symbols of death. I am with myself, trying to discern at this time in my life; I find it a bit rewarding and sad but infinitely more challenging than a round of golf. In that globe is why I have no close friend, why I have made the mistakes of my life, why  I was or was not a good father — or husband, why I failed in my own eyes, for culture’s condemnation or not does not concern me at all. In that snowglobe is revealed for me for all time how essentially immaterial are the tantrums of Sarah Palin, who has no snowglobe except her own reflection in Todd’s harpoon tip.