Monday, June 1, 2009

The last great courtroom of desire

Chicago, late summer. I thought I’d go to watch the money race out of my wallet. (What an economical oddity this city is: everything costs twenty dollars when it comes with a beer.) Cermak, Quincy, Divison, and the blithe bohemia of Wicker blight—and yet—Chicago’s a gas, but you just can’t quit the air that breathes you.

I sat alone in a park as the sun nosed below a row of brownstones, throwing everything in progressive layers of night, the immediately local activity now cloaked in mere suggestion. Nearby, someone playing Frisbee in a geyser of affable obscenities. Five murmuring babushkas on the bench next to me, a Polish gaggle of dowagers and spinsters helping busy up the fountain square, their collaboration lasting well after dark. The water giggling. History crossing its arms. The shades of passing couples multiplying fixedly, alarmingly, the park suddenly a carnival of hearts on this hungry night of August, everyone precariously clothed, imprisoned at this hour between talking and making love. And this is the miracle of cities. All afraid of dying and so needing motion near; needing, and finding. Dresses flapping softly; the El, roaring its consent.

The night, the night, and summer’s fear of fall.

And yet.

We think of existence as fragile. The entirety of eschatological and moral discourse is defined by this recognition. And yet neglected is the almost incomprehensible power of memory to eradicate reality. Totally. To transform itself into a great destroyer of worlds, arriving suddenly like some handsome second cousin of the abyss come to rearrange the fundamental moorings of the cosmos.

Because on that night my happy little ember of urbanitas—brownstones and youth and babushkas all—was doused remorselessly by the remembered glimpse of a pair of empty stilettos collapsed ownerless next to someone’s front door. And for a complete ten seconds the heartrending memory of a bedroom four hundred miles away assembled itself at the indisputable center of the known universe, all the rest of creation arrayed like a distant satellite in a sad loose orbit of this presence, this protuberance, this one true god.

The last great courtroom of desire.

We don’t find memories that strong. They find us. And for those of us for whom the quest for an afterlife seems a little morally transparent, the presence of memory becomes the last most sacred of secular beatitudes. And it’s a worship with which we are already familiar, absurdly manifest everywhere in culture, in pictures, in paintings, in those stories we tell a million times, those million-time mythologies of our lives told so often that it’s commonly concealed that nothing of the original sensory matter remains, often only an assembled configuration of probationary approximations clinging loosely to facts safely established in the casual public of our minds. Yet we persist.

Memory is everywhere because memory is how we stop time; memory is how we live forever.

But time is never truly stopped. And we never live forever, and the Second City will always reassemble itself around you, reconstituting that bench where you sit alone on that dying night in August. Days pass and end. This much is certain and inevitable. To this end, our memories are perfectly powerless, no matter how bound they are to the very reality of the human soul.

But to quote Proust—we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps even less probable.

The water giggling. History crossing its arms. Dresses flapping softly, and the El roaring its consent. These words are all that remain.

And yet.

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