29 August 2007
How do we keep the experience?
)Published on August 29th, 2007 @ 02:05:02 pm, using 652 words, 82 views
I’m starting to feel ridiculous.
I hate that feeling. I hate the involuntary act of looking back and feeling ridiculous - of second guessing something that once felt right. It reminds me of something I read on a Michael Ondaatje novel – his take on remorse: “A strange word. It suggests a turning around on yourself.”
The last scene of Six Degrees of Separation always gets to me, precisely because I’m inclined to indulge remorse. Like Ouisa Kittredge, I ask myself more often than I’d like, “How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote? (…) It was an experience! How do we keep the experience?” There’s something so desperate and so noble about her wanting to hold on to what she feels. Desperate because everything we feel seems so fragile, fleeting and precarious. Noble because in this day and age it’s just so rare for someone to consider a feeling a treasure to be kept and fought for and protected from the merciless hands of time. A feeling shouldn’t be fated to either vanish or be the object of remorse. It should remain the feeling it once was, merely transported from reality to the old memory bank. That would be infinitely more dignified.
How do we keep what happens to us? How do we keep the experience?
(Originally written on March 16, 2007)
Why does it mean so much to you?
He wanted to be us. Everything we are in the world. This paltry thing, our life, he wanted it. He stabbed himself to get into our lives. He envied us. We’re not enough to be envied.
Like the paper said we do have hearts.
Having a heart is not the point. We were hardly taken in. We believed him for a few hours. He did more for us in a few hours than our children ever did. And he wanted to be your child, don’t let that go. He sat out in that park and said “That man is my father.” He’s in trouble and we don’t know how to help him.
Help him? My God! We could’ve been killed. Throats slashed.
You were attracted to him!
Oh, please, cut me out of that pathology right now.
Attracted by his youth, his talent, and the embarrassing prospect of being in the movie version of Cats
Cats, yes
Did you put that in your Times piece? And we turn him into an anecdote to dine out on like we’re doing right now. But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote with no teeth? A punch line you’ll mouth over and over years to come “Oh, that reminds me of the time that impostor came into our lives” “Oh, tell the one about that boy…” And we become these human jukeboxes spilling out these anecdotes… But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?
That’s why I love paintings. Cézanne. The problems he brought up then are the problems painters are still dealing with. Color, structure. Those are problems.
There is color in my life but I’m not aware of any structure.
What are you saying, darling?
Cézanne would leave blank spaces in his canvases as if he could not account for the brushstroke… couldn’t give a reason for the color.
Then, I’m a collage of unaccounted for brushstrokes. I… am all… random. Excuse me.
(Six Degrees of Separation – John Guare)
Click here to read another of my favorite scenes from Six Degrees of Separation.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Remorse, Six Degrees of Separation, feelings, precarious, fragile, fleeting, treasuring experiences
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