What if…memory only kind of matters?
On the impossibility of sharing a spiritual experience and the compulsion to try anyway.
Hi!
I’m playing around with doing Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer, so there might be some meandering situations happening here in the near future. And by near future, I also mean right now. Because why not? We’re all just doing our silly little experiments on an all-things-considered pretty small rock hurtling through space. Anyway!
The other day, I went to a book event. A book talk? On Ocean Vuong’s website (it was for the paperback release of Time Is A Mother), these happenings are categorized as “Appearances.” But you know the kind of thing I’m talking about. An author promoting something and another author or person of literary esteem (not promoting something) have a “conversation” in front of an audience. Before the conversation, there’s usually a reading, and after the conversation, there’s a contest where different guys attempt to solicit the largest amount of free therapy/advice for their own personal issues Q&A, and then maybe a book signing.
The appearance, which lasted about 60 minutes, left me with two major questions:
1. Why do I not go to things like this all of the time? They’re usually free or inexpensive, not booze-centric, and fill up my nerd cup in a way little else does. So what’s my excuse here besides “it’s hard to leave the house sometimes, especially at night?” Can I get over this somehow?
2. How do I explain what I experienced listening to Ocean talk? (I will refer to Vuong as Ocean here because that’s what Lan Duong called him in their conversation — I can still hear the cadence, and anything else feels alien.)
The answer to the first question is something like “more accountability.” The second? I’m still not sure. Because what happened was akin to the kind of spiritual experience that people talk about in 12-step programs. This went beyond seeing a snail on my hike or catching a particularly fresh jasmine bush whiff. I feel like I’m overhyping and under-hyping at the same time. But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel, attempting to elucidate what can only be experienced.
Ocean’s appearance was on a Saturday, the day I usually go 100% screen-free. So aside from using my phone to get an Uber and find my friends before going into the auditorium, I tried to stay screen-free while sitting in Zipper Hall. I took a single blurry photo a few minutes in, then turned my phone off.
When you’re not using your screen, it can be hard to avoid looking at what other people are doing on theirs. To live vicariously, maybe. Or maybe not. I lasered into the person in front of me recording at length, looking up words like “diaspora” on Merriam Webster, scrolling through their Poshmark offers. I silently judged them for this. “Ocean is speaking, honey, have some respect!!” But aside from bidding on secondhand Lululemon Aligns, maybe attempting to understand more deeply or commit something to memory with exactitude is “having respect?” Or am I correct on my high horse, haughty with the belief that the only way to show respect and consideration toward someone’s art is to be fully present?
In attempting to use my phone less, particularly in going full days without it, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the ways in which people act in moments of awe. Is the untarnished-by-tech memory more “pure” than the one captured? Haley Nahman wrote about this recently, particularly on the impulse to capture ordinary moments, the compulsion to document, and how that documentation rarely satisfies our future selves.
At one point during the appearance, Ocean responded to a question from the moderator (could not tell you what the question was) with a story about getting his photograph taken by Nan Goldin. They were in this garden, the sunlight cascading through the leaves onto his face, when Nan said something like, “Ocean, you’re so beautiful right now. I just wish the camera wasn’t in the way.”
I can’t fully express what hearing this story felt like. How choked up Ocean was and, in turn, how the timbre of the room changed as we joined him. How thinking of writing and making as a way of seeing better, of being more present and alive, was somehow new and not new at all to me, conceptually. How at the end of the talk, there was an audience question (pre-submitted and approved, thank God) about coming home when home no longer exists, and how Ocean answered it by speaking of the endless loss and grief he experienced in the early days of the opioid epidemic. How he then sang a hymn in its entirety to a silent, enraptured room. How I don’t remember the name of the hymn, but I remember standing up afterward, sinuses heavy, eyes watering, joining the applause. How that response felt so small, so inadequate in expressing the depth and tenor of communal awe we were basking in. I don’t have the words, and maybe I don’t need them. Maybe the feelings are marked somewhere deep beyond the reaches of logic and intellect for later access, for later action?
The entire situation reminds me of something I read recently about how a certain author doesn’t write down their ideas because they believe the ones worth pursuing will persistently come back, a sort of reverse chasing. Who was this author? I have no idea, and I just spent 15 minutes trying to mine my archives to figure it out before realizing it doesn’t matter. Life is not an academic paper. And maybe forgetting is a filter that frees up space for what we actually need.
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Previously mentioned #1000wordsofsummer, which I will very likely not complete, but had fun doing today.
Another thing Ocean said about how he teaches his students the difference between motivation and intention. How motivation is great, sure. But how intention, returning to our former selves to see why we started doing the writing in the first place, is what will keep us going.
Mer People on Netflix. I’ll surely reco this again later at length, but I implore you to watch it now. A rich text!!
also: dudes who have fifteen-minute long "questions" designed to show how "smart" they are.