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March 6, 2008The answer is no.The question is…Minutes after I posted my last discourse on dating, the Washington Post arrived in my email, with this remark by music critic Ann Midgette about Philly maestro Christoph Eschenbach’s appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra. “A first date comes before each partner has discovered the other’s baggage, the other’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Both sides had them on Tuesday night, but they didn’t yet matter. If this was indeed a first date with an eye toward a longer relationship, one could imagine that there would be a second one. And if it wasn’t, it was at the very least a fine Brahms First.” That is my wish for all you daters out there, even if the date didn’t develop into something more; may you at the very least have had a fine Brahms First. And if you did meet your true love or made good friends via the web, God bless. I just don’t want to go that route, because anything and everything has gone electronic, digital, virtual—mail, chess, porn, golf—I want to keep meeting people a human exchange. Though a man’s writing facility is very important to me, especially whether he uses “your” for “you’re,” I want to be impressed with someone’s physical bearing and carriage. I don’t want to be “leafing” through personals thinking, eh!, no, not my type, too old, too young, too tall. I want to react to the person himself. I don’t want my face plastered on Facebook. I do have relationships that developed through email, but I can’t see putting myself “out there” via social networking and dating sites for people to pick over. “Well, this is me! Here are the goods. Here are the specs. What do you think?” [BUZZER SOUNDS] Next! Eschenbach was the powerhouse behind the Philly boys’ killer performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, here at Davies. I remember I cried at the end while applauding and it was because the Fifth had already taken on a luster of sadness, because I knew the next day I was going to get my heart broken. I had arranged it that way. DO YOU KNOW?What would you say if someone asked you who you are? You would tell them your name, no doubt, but beyond that, who are you? Well, I’m Alexandra Jones, I’m a writer living in San Francisco, originally from Philadelphia, where my family still lives; I am I am 52 years old and not married, never have been, doubt I ever will be, don’t have children; I have a degree in English from Temple University; I lived in Philly for 26 years, Portland, Oregon for 15 years, with a brief hiatus on Whidbey Island, Wash., then moved to Berkeley for six, and finally bought a flat in SF, where I have lived for four years, and which I am about to sell so I can continue to live as a writer free from “day” jobs. Well, if I did write a Personals Profile, what further information would I include? What do I find to be essential about me? I’m a Bach freak—he is my religion, proof of the divine nature of human existence; I love love love music, literature, art, and going to films, concerts, interesting events and socializing in small groups. My soul mate is Jack Kerouac. The most exciting thing in life is a great live performance of great music. The most satisfying thing is life is a perfectly crafted sentence. I love travel, train travel, places unknown and exploring my own familiar terrain to discover new things. I do not particularly care for long walks on the beach, because I seldom take them, though buses and trains near my flat go straight there. Sports are of no interest to me; I’ve never been a team player and I lack the competitive concern for who wins or loses, but I do admire individual excellence. My approach to life now is to follow the Golden Track, per Hesse’s Steppenwolf, to live my own life and not spend it doing others’ work. That’s not what God wants of me. Like Eckhart Tolle, I believe that life is more a journey of seeking than finding, there is no destination and no arrival. It’s all about what’s happening now. I don’t need to plan things far in advance. If I think of something I want to and am able to do, I do it, whether moving cross country, traveling, loving a man, or quitting a job. BUT WHAT IF YOU FOUNDyou don’t know who you are, as Douglas Bruce did on a subway on Coney Island, as depicted in Rupert Muller’s documentary: “Unknown White Male,” about a British guy in New York who mysteriously goes into a fugue state resulting in retrograde amnesia, wiping out all his personal memories. The tagline of the film is “If you lost your past, would you want it back?” According to the film, Bruce lost his episodic memory—the story of his life—and much of his semantic memory, or general knowledge of the world, but retained some procedural memory (how to do certain things, like ride a bike). I was surprised after seeing the film that many people, on imdb.com, anyway, consider Bruce and the film to be a hoax. This never entered my mind, because, for the same reason I am naïve and stupid about politics—it doesn’t occur to me that anyone would want to perpetrate a hoax. Why would they? Why would anyone go to the length of such an elaborate charade? But I am not going to deal with the questionable aspects of the story. I am more interested in the questions the film raises. Director Rupert Murray asks at the beginning of the film, “How much of our past lives, the thousands of moments we experience, help to make us who we are? If you took all of these remembrances, these memories away, what would be left? How much is our personality—our identity—determined by the experiences we have, and how much is already there—pure us?” FINDING OUT WHO YOU AREis the great universal personal journey of growth. Who am I? Who hasn’t asked themselves that? But if your memories of who you are are wiped out, who, then, are you? If I lost my episodic memory but not my semantic memory, would I know who Beethoven is but not remember ever hearing a single note of his music? In which case, would I still love it when I heard it? THE ANSWER IS NOThe question is, can one hear Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony too many times? The answer is no. Even having just heard it at the SF Conservatory, having since listened to Masur’s CD in a continuous loop, I could not stay away from this week’s coincidental performances by the SF Symphony. It was sold out but I got a last-minute turn-back ticket in the front row directly in front of violin soloist Gil Shaham, who played the hell out of William Schuman’s violin concerto. I’ve never heard the piece so I pretended I’d never heard music performed live at all and this was my introduction. To my surprise, Gil Shaman played it as if it were his own first time hearing it. The passing looks of awe and astonishment that played over his face as he rediscovered every note as he played it again was truly moving. The poor guy was dripping sweat from his forehead and nose onto his pants. Those lights must be ferocious. He also had a killer case of bruxism (teeth-grinding). I’m sure his dentist has cautioned him against that, but for music—anything! Occupational hazard. And then the Beethoven, once again. The Eroica, as I mentioned, is a contender for sole piece of music to keep me company on a desert island. You cannot feel hopeless when listening to this music. Even the freakin’ Funeral March becomes a soaring hymn you could fly to heaven on. But I truly was trying to hear it for the first time, and as in any live performance of familiar music, there were notes and tones and instruments I’ve never noticed before. I closed my eyes and was transported to another dimension. You cannot feel hopeless when you hear this music. Plus—I saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the lobby. Cool! “Why should Doug be obsessed with the past,” Rupert asks, “when what lay in front of him was a voyage of unbelievable discovery? Doug now saw the world with the eyes of a newborn baby, but appreciated it with the mind of an adult.” NEAT TRICK!As his sister put it, he was able to learn daily, which feat most of us are too deadened to the usual old world to open ourselves to. Or as Muller put it, it was “as if his senses had been sharpened by a rebooting of the system.” Doug had been studying photography before his “accident,” and he went back to it because it gave him a sense of purpose and pursuit. Stephen Frailey, the Photography Dept. Chairman said, “A creative sensibility, for the most part, as far as conventional wisdom goes, is formed by our memory, is formed by our past, it’s the accumulation of our experience. If you wipe that slate clean, how do you develop a sensibility, how do you figure out what’s relevant to you, if you’re going to pursue your art with any sort of depth…how do you figure out what your subject is?” If my slate were wiped clean, would I still be a writer? Because I’ve always considered myself to be a writer of the “born” variety. Would someone have to tell me? Would I read my own words as if someone else had written them? Or would I still have that hunger for words, would I instantly feel the need to figure out the experience by writing about it? I have had the experience of not remembering something I’d written a while ago—and finding it damn good!—and it was as if I was regarding this “creator” side of myself who’s perfectly sure of what she’s doing and I (the “watcher”) wouldn’t dream of second-guessing her, I just need to respect her decisions. SO ASK YOURSELF,if you had rid yourself of your past, would you want it back? You’d have no choice but to start from scratch, and once you’d built a life for yourself, would you want that flood of memory to overtake you? Could it harm you? “If you encode things,” says Doug at the end of the film. “and then, depending on who you are as a person, you remember them in a specific way and then sort of create this personal history which is a bazaar, if you like, a bazaar of myths and truths and embellishments of all kinds of hodge-podges of distortion, and in fact if that makes up who we are, then who are we, really? Do you know?” I do know who I am, and I still feel awesome feelings of disconnection from most people and the “real world,” so I can’t imagine the horror of having not a clue as to what you are doing here and how you got here. So where does personality come from? Is it a brain function, bred in the bone, or an amalgam of experience? Because he basically became another person, built from the bottom up, based on his new experiences. I don’t believe the guy is a fraud. It would be too incredibly long and elaborate a long con to convince everyone you’ve ever known you’d no memory of them, just so you could become a curiosity, a celebrity, and ditch whatever it had been that displeased you. I may be naïve, but I don’t see guile in his eyes. I don’t see it in my own, either. Tell me if you do. I want to learn daily. And now some comic relief… FREEZE THE POOP FOR EASY CLEAN UPTelebrands email to the author:
Thank you, Telebrands. You never fail to amuse. MY NEW CLAIM TO FAMEMarch is the third anniversary of The Ax Files. My first post, “Dicks and Pricks,” was on March 22, 2005. This is my 78th post. Some of them are so long they should have been 2 or 3 separate posts. I’m not much of a talker, but on paper I can’t shut up. I’ve never flattered myself that everyone who gets my email links reads my posts. Some people have got to be too busy to read them and perhaps it’s easier to JHD (just hit DELETE), but in all that time, 36 months, only one person has taken the time to ask to be removed from my list. In my last column I referred to him as a “high-profile San Francisco personage.” Well now he’s a higher-profile national personage, and he is none other than VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MATT GONZALEZHow cool is that? He didn’t explain himself, and wrote blandly enough, “please remove me from your list thanks.” As his email arrived early a.m. the morning after I posted my George Carlin piece, I assumed he clicked briefly and decided he didn’t need to start his day with this crap (shit, piss, etc.). OR was he about to become too busy to JHD? Or did he not want evidence of my crude language on his email system in case it should “come out” he gets questionable emails from agents provocateurs? I’ll never know, because Matt is not the type to reveal himself. He can barely say hello. He is the poster child for social retardation. He has walked away from countless people with no word of farewell. He did, however respond to the email I sent him after Nader’s announcement that he will serve as his running mate—a verse from Longfellow: “Try not the Pass!” the old man said: Excelsior! His reply: Gracias. You betcha!
------------------------------------------------------------ Don’t know who you are?
Don't I know you from somewhere? copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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