Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  "How many, I'd ask now, experienced precisely the experience Mr. Maxwell can voice to us? How many believe the actuality of their individual experience was precisely as he says? Certainly we must recognize the value in childhood of such wonderful tales, but also we must face the problematic fact of the individuality of memory, as wise adults."

  I had no idea whether I agreed or disagreed, and, more important, whether I'd been praised or criticized. I'd only meant to try and guess what everyone might remember, but Mr. Brown took it far along some other path, pursuing some idea that must've been bugging him lately. It was like getting one of Father's notes, only I didn't have any clear written record of it to look at and contemplate.

  I asked Mr. Brown, after, if he could recommend some reading, just to make things clear to me.

  "Look, Mr. Maxwell, at the inscription on this building," he suggested cryptically. "That should be plenty for the first day."

  It said "Social Sciences," chiseled in the stone. Deep, sharp letters cut in the rock by a metal blade banged hard with a craftsman's hammer. The bright white sunlight dappled through the tall crowd of eucalyptus that lurched and lapped over the stone facade, dancing across the even letters. "Social Sciences." The two words were falling apart in my head. The various pieces were so elusive, devoid of meanings, or rather too full of them. "Really, there's too much to see," Father had said. I felt I needed a map to navigate my way across their mysterious surface.

  "Social Sciences." It was the fact of their existence in stone, I guess. Really I found the shapes, carved so neatly, had fixed my attention. How could a blade be made to curve so cleanly round as the one that carved "S"? Why was there no moss growing in these wonderful fissures? The "o," a perfect moat protecting nothing, a vertical moat in a climate where it seldom rained. I thought I'd best keep quiet in class until things became clearer.

  19 AUGUST 1915

  Dear Robert,

  Many thanks for the poetry, etc. Darwin was a queer choice. I thoroughly enjoy his prose but I find his analysis particularly disturbing as I witness this slaughter.

  My mind is far away, in music, or a fanciful memory of Primrose Hill or Cornwall, a soft evening in spring, the smell of narcissus. And on the table is another blood-soaked sheet of cloth with God knows what horror wrapped inside. Any word from Mother? I've not heard a peep in several weeks and find my mind ill at ease.

  Jake brought this one in. We sing it loud enough for the Bosche to join in.

  Mr. Dunphy gives me the creeps.

  The wind chimes ring a strange, familiar song, but I still can't place it.

  22 AUGUST 1915

  I'd thought Saturdays would be lazy days, but Mr. Wilson scheduled General Recreation for Saturday mornings (and Duncan's swimming has been set for Saturday afternoons). So I spent yesterday trying my hand at basketball, something for which I have a great deal of enthusiasm but very little facility. Today I slept in with Duncan for the first time since we moved.

  We drove each other to delirium, it being so long since. I fancy I can make his body burst one of these times soon, and him mine too. We fell in and out of half sleep, dimly aware of a world that was fully awake and bathed in the day's sunshine. We weren't, and that was fine. I can say so much more to him when my mind is too tired to work. That buzzing, hummed growl comes crawling into my throat, replacing the confusing array of words that normally clutter our conversations. It's a song in my bones. It's like a dog's loving whine, simple and pure. My song has a tune, slippery and erratic, but a tune nonetheless. If I think and try to place it, the whole thing just disappears.

  It reminds me of the problem of reading in the dark. You must keep looking to the side to see anything at all.

  All my classes have begun and I find it quite exciting to be taught by actual professors and sit in lovely old lecture halls with students taking notes and none of the "flimsiness," as Flora puts it, of Lowell. Military Training is the only blemish on my schedule but I've just decided not to attend. I have no interest in learning the finer points of war or marching around a field with little wooden rifles trying to mind the diagonals. Duncan says it's great fun and I should think of it as a great elaborate game with a multitude of players and simple rules like he does. I don't understand its attraction.

  There's that eerie chime again. I think it's a very old song. Like Latin, if ever it's sung.

  26 AUGUST 1915

  Mr. Dunphy is the chaplain from The Cautionary Tales, the one where George blows the house to bits with the cursed balloon. And Mr. Thwing looks rather like George, truth be told. Maybe this is why his face has bothered me, floating in my mind, obscurely wed to the awful chaplain whose death I'd imagined so many times when I was little. My first nightmares came from The Cautionary Tales. Evidently they'd lingered somewhere, contributing an unspecific bad taste whenever I saw Mr. Dunphy.

  I didn't see Duncan until late in the afternoon (again), a little past five, when I came back from drawing—four hours every Tuesday and Thursday. He'd pushed the room around into our planned rearrangement, two lovely chairs and a small end table gathered in the double bays facing south. He looked up from a big picturebook of buildings and smiled big and bright as I've ever seen, bouncing up from the doubled-up beds and wrestling me back down onto them.

  "You," he said. "Why've you been gone so long?"

  I rundled my fingers round through his thick brown hair, scritching his scalp and squeezing the soft skin at the base of his neck.

  "Drawing goes till five. Tuesday and Thursday. Where were you when I came back after Hygiene?"

  "When?"

  "Nine. I came back straightaway to have breakfast." I did. Mrs. Dunphy was puttering about in her housecoat, sniffing at old biscuits in the bread box.

  "I have Calculus at nine."

  I rolled over on top of him. "Hhmmph," I grunted. "I had breakfast with Mrs. Dunphy."

  He licked me up my neck, and mimicked me. "Hhmmph. Was it a distinct pleasure?"

  Professor Kurtz had mentioned "distinct pleasures" not more than a day ago, though without reference to Mrs. Dunphy. He'd put the emphasis on "distinct."

  We'd begun with some sort of ancient ritual recitation, all of us muttering syllables from off the board. They were in Greek and I don't know Greek. Nor does most the class. The portly Kurtz (he'd chosen to wear black academic gowns that day) insisted we recite in unison our reading of these oddly squiggled words and so we did. There were twenty of us, using our voices uncertainly. The professor stood up front booming the correct pronunciations, waving his thickly draped arms like an overweight bat attempting takeoff, and generally inspiring in us a reckless spirit of camaraderie. If an ancient Greek should have happened by I'm certain our "language" would've passed through his ears unrecognized.

  "Utterly indistinct," Professor Kurtz whispered into the silence that followed our brief recitation. "Like a babbling brook to a deer." I gazed out the arched window imagining deer afoot in the forest, their soft ears stood up and stiff, listening to the distant babble of the brook.

  "The sounds Greek men made in conversation, the melodious songs they sang onstage as drama. Through your mouths they are torn and mangled into noise, reduced to indistinct utterance." I sat in rapt attention now, as he'd brought the topic around to us, and I was beginning to fear his reproach. To my great relief it was not forthcoming.

  "But you are not to blame for the ravages of time, the failure of man to preserve what has passed. The perfect song of Aeschylus, the lilting words of Euripides are to you nothing more than air. Loud empty air." I noticed the persistent scribbling of my more mature classmates, some of whom smoked pipes. They seemed to be making records of Kurtz's introductory comments. Eager to keep up, I opened my little pamphlet of "Orestes" and composed a few brief notes on the back flap.

  "Greek air," I began. "Noise not song." It reminded me of those frustrating moments when words held nothing for me, as when Duncan ran away and I couldn't find words to say "stay." I know I failed, not the
words. "Stay" is more than empty air. But it was not enough to say all I felt. This little daydream took me far away, sailing over the bay and above the ferry to watch myself looking back at the Berkeley shore, looking to see Duncan running. I didn't see him then, that day, but I could see him now, remembering, floating a few hundred feet above, in my head. I returned to class with the sharp slap of a yardstick across the tabletop.

  "Clear distinction is the essence of a working language." Profesor Kurtz seemed to be addressing this elusive bit of wisdom to me. I scribbled it quickly onto my flap.

  "Clear distinctions," I wrote.

  "The pleasure distinctions give is communication. Words sit separately from one another, holding and containing some meaningful portion of experience, carving out that simple part and capturing it in a clear sound."

  "Distinct pleasures," I scribbled, summarizing a bit.

  " 'Desk.' Said, heard. That simple thing held. 'Plate.' 'Cap.' 'Pipe.' Each sound said, heard. Each sound holding the simple thing inside."

  "Hold my cap and pipe." Notes were really quite simple, once one got the drift of things. Others were nodding their heads judiciously, in time with Kurtz's steady, even syllables.

  Do words hold things inside? I could easily think so. There is no better explanation for the mind's conjuring of exactly that right thing upon hearing the sound of the word. "Cat" is said, and what do I see? A cat, somewhere in my head. It reminds me of Cicero's memory matrices. They were meant to hold whole thoughts of things past. It is that same hope of holding something that is fluid and many-layered inside some frozen, fixed surface. "Cat." As thin and brittle a surface as you'll find anywhere, even at the Fair.

  Or "Duncan." Some things words can't hold. They're too big or they never hold still. Somehow they keep exceeding the borders of the word or changing the shape of it. Like the word "fear" can never fully hold the actual experience it is supposed to hold. That's like holding hot molten lead in a thin gum bubble. The edge is indistinct and unfixed. There is no clear distinction.

  Duncan and I lay there half-napping in the late evening in our room and didn't say any more. My mouth could not find reliable words to hold what I felt. Kissing him became the only fulfilling alternative. It was something my mouth could offer that was wide and wet enough to carry what I felt across to him.

  * * *

  29 AUGUST 1915

  Flora's arrived in Berkeley and will begin classes tomorrow, only a week late. She'll be taking Professor Brown's course on memory, which I'm in, and Duncan's English course. The rest is a mystery to me, except she's got Ladies' Physical Education. She's asked if she may perform her little rite of spring with me and the five ladies.

  She's taken that little room in Mrs. Meekshtais's house, on our recommendation. We bundled all her bags up, tying them by ropes to her motorcar, and she drove off round the bottom of the bay to move in today.

  Duncan and I were in the city most of the morning, first with Flora and then at our house, packing up various things to bring back over to Berkeley. Mother dropped in to find out about classes and to gauge my general health and grooming.

  We packed the magic lamp and a tiny metal vessel Duncan keeps by his bed, and two carpets, both quite small, one from by the fire and the other from the kitchen. I gathered up the books I'd been reading in the spring, the ones I'd never finished. Mother sat very primly in the window seat and prompted me with questions, gazing out into the street and brushing her short little bob as I packed.

  "Does the art instructor use Ruskin?" she asked.

  "No," I answered, "though he seemed interested when I told him I'd used Ruskin for the lines. He won't be giving me his own instruction until I'm through with this project." I reached around under my bed for any books I might've let slide there. "He believes one learns best by pursuing independent work."

  "Is there any treatment of the history of art?"

  The Thousand and One Nights came out, wrapped in a packing of dust.

  "Not in a studio course, Mummy. Don't be daft. I'll take that in the history department, next term."

  "Don't call me daft, pumpkin. Many great educators have worked wonders by combining studio time with historical investigation." She smiled a quick smile, drawing the brush down across her bangs. "I'm merely inquiring about those features I've come to expect from higher-quality universities."

  "Well, truth be told, I've a feeling Berkeley isn't really so high quality a university." I shared this little confidence, letting her in on an opinion I'd originally thought to hide.

  She brought the brush down to her lap.

  "Really, pumpkin?" she asked with a tilt of her head. "Why is that?"

  "They've required me to take Military Training," I began, inflaming her with what I knew would hit hardest. "And our schedules are so helter-skelter Duncan and I have no classes together and rarely see each other at all until the evening when we're long past pooped out and don't have the energy to beat a flea, let alone do anything together," I went on, getting to what really mattered most to me.

  "Military Training?" Mother interrupted. "For you in particular?"

  "For everyone, Mummy. Every 'able-bodied young man.' " I gave her the horrible truth straight out.

  "Oh, pumpkin, tenderness. How awful for you." She came across to the bed where I was sitting with my little book. "Surely there must be some proviso for those who object to such folly."

  I held my hands in my lap and looked up at her kind face.

  "None." And I tilted my head just a touch. "I've not been attending. Because of my objections." I smartly left the nature of those objections vague (which, in point of fact, was an act of utter honesty; my objections were vague and purposefully unspecific). "I hope no trouble comes of it."

  "And Duncan? What has Duncan done about this requirement?" She rubbed my slumping shoulders sympathetically.

  "Duncan doesn't mind," I admitted, after considering a small lie. "He enjoys the exercise and the sheer numbers, as he puts it."

  "Simply terrible," Mother muttered, still musing on my fate. "They're dragging you into the army by the back door."

  "Not to mention my schedule," I added, returning to the real issue.

  "Yes, of course," she agreed. "That awful schedule."

  "All helter-skelter," I reminded her.

  "Of course, dearest. Hardly a moment with your friends, as you were saying."

  I was glad she remembered. "That's right. Do eastern schools operate in this same way?" I asked, knowing she was fond of eastern schools. "I mean, do they require military service and force you to split off from your friends?"

  "Oh, of course not, pumpkin." She drew back at the very thought of it. "Oh, no, no. Harvard, Yale, Columbia. They're much more progressive in their attitudes toward military service, I'm certain of it. Mind you, their academic demands are strict and traditional. Only the finest minds flourish." And she smiled at the thought of it. "They're much smaller in size than Berkeley, so I'm sure you'd be with whatever chums you had there."

  "I was only asking for instance, not to go there."

  She brushed my hair back with her hand.

  "Of course, dearest. One must give Berkeley a fair shake before thinking about other schools."

  I patted her knee emphatically. "Mummy, we're not thinking about other schools. I don't know if Duncan would even want to go east."

  "If he's happy with Berkeley, with their military training, I don't suppose he'd want to go anywhere." She drummed her fingers on The Thousand and One Nights.

  "I didn't say he was happy here. He's as upset about the schedule as I am. That's the reason we'd want to change. Not just because of some military requirement."

  'I find the military requirement quite troubling." "Well, yes. It is troubling." I stopped to put my thoughts back together. Somehow they'd fallen apart in the wake of Mother's various enthusiasms. "I'm happy to give Berkeley its chance, despite the problems. But we need to think what would be best for us, and maybe it'll be someplace else. W
ho knows?" Mother kept her lips smartly shut, pursed in a tight little line, and nodded her head judiciously. I took the book and put it in a pile I'd started by the door, blowing the dust bunnies back to oblivion and pawing through the few titles I'd rescued so far.

  Dear Robert,

  Have they located the soul, do you know? Is it in the pineal gland? It's got nothing to do with the legs or torso, I'm certain. A leg, by itself, even with spasms of movement, is entirely devoid of spirit. An arm less so. The face of course is imbued with personality even long after death has taken away any motility. A reaching hand, fingers grasping—even if completely severed—stirs nearly the same empathy as a face.

  Didn't Father live in Abbeville? It's mentioned in the Ruskin you sent me, how the valley has been so terribly changed by the new architecture. I hope to visit on the Somme before returning, after all of this ends. I've been quite lucky.

  What are the papers saying in the States? Did I once say I pitied you your neutrality? Forgive me.

  31 AUGUST 1915

  "Your body is a battlefield. As with any battle, one finds allied forces on both sides." I wrote it down in pencil. Bar-bar bar-bar. Mr. Legge droned on.

  "I speak of microbes. We must pay homage to Semmelweis, for his was a martyr's life." I was quite unsure whether I was awake or still sleeping.

  "Don't imagine, like the ignorant practitioners of just six decades past, that simple neatness will suffice to protect the temple that is your body. For it is a temple." I felt certain I'd read that somewhere before. Perhaps Mr. Legge has published, I thought. I found my lazy pen sketching out temples, ornate, fleshy temples, bedecked with prayer flags and thin pillars. My notes for Mr. Legge always went beyond simple words.