Unfortunate Travellers: Notes on Memory

When Garcia Marquez died in 2014 he left an unfinished novel, comprised of five drafts and nearing 800 

pages. He also left explicit instructions to his sons that it should not be published. Now, they have done so.

 Should they have?  Who is to say?

 

Did his instructions stem from his inability to write, or, as his memory failed in late years, his ability to read, to understand what he had already written before his memory began to fail?  Again, we can’t know.

 

I don’t intend to read it.  But I do intend to read both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Choleraagain.  Since very few books written in the twentieth century measure up to those two, I don’t know why we would expect the posthumous book to do so.

 

Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, famously disobeyed Kafka’s wish to have all his unpublished work destroyed after he died.  A cause for celebration in that case.

 

I am a compulsive keeper of my own papers.  I couldn’t tell you why. Old syllabi, notes, journals, annotated calendars, rough and abandoned drafts of various projects.  Lists of gear to be packed for climbing trips. Correspondence (from the analog era). The thought of leaving this mess to my wife or son after I’m gone is truly embarrassing.  And yet . . .

 

Was going through these (six bins) the other day, looking for the first decent piece of writing I managed to do.  Something we would now, perhaps, call autofiction. It was a portrait of an old friend who performed an almost invisible heroic deed when we were sixteen years old.

 

The occasion for this search was that my friend, the subject of that story, is now suffering from some form of Alzheimers; I don’t know the exact diagnosis.  But it’s heartbreaking to observe firsthand. 

 

I saw him at an alumni gathering last in December.  He could be out in public, with his brother and sister as handlers.  He knew who I was and we were happy to see each other.  A big strong hug ensued, and lingered.  I could see that he was in there, but somehow access to his full self had been denied him.

 

When I moved off to talk with some others, he said to my sister, “I’m having such a good time,  I just wish David could have been here.”

 

When searching the bins I also came across a packet of academic essays that I wrote in graduate school, circa 1986 to about 1999. Even these I couldn’t toss. Not only did I not remember writing them, I did not remember reading many of the books (texts) upon which they were based.

 

I wrote down the titles, fourteen of them, including:

“A Recurring Moment of Negotiation: Odysseus’ Encounters with Nausicaa, Kirke, and Penelope” 

 

“A Close Reading of the Text within the Text of Jim Harrison’s ‘Legends of the Fall’”

 

“Problems of Closure in the Roman Farce: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Moby Dick”

 

 

The one that was met the most approval from my professor was on Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.  Today, I couldn’t tell you one thing about either The Unfortunate Traveller or what I had to say about it.

 

All writing contains aa mostly unwritten  message: “I was here.”

 

During that same time I also wrote an equal amount of fiction, all of which I remember, and much of which would become my first published book, Letters from Chamonix, almost a quarter century later.

 

Last week we went to hear John Gorka, a singer songwriter of about my age. A couple audience members familiar with hi work shouted out titles of his songs they hoped he would play.  “Those are pretty good songs,” he said, paused a beat and added, “But I don’t know them.”

 

In a graduate school Henry Staten was lecturing on literary theory, probably deconstruction. “It’s like, he said, when you go to the library, and you know where the book you’re looking for is, but when you reach for it, it’s not there.  There’s a gap where you expected it to be.

 

I clearly remember Henry’s metaphor, but not the point which it was supposed to illustrate.

 

If you don’t remember something, how do you know that you don’t remember it?  You must remember that you don’t remember. You must be aware of the gap, the hole where the memory was stored. This must be related to what Henry was talking about that day.

 

At the alumni gathering,in a quiet moment my friend, confided in me, “David I am fucked. I. Am. Fucked.”

 

“We all are, my friend,” I said, “We all are.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Godspeed my friend, David Johnston, with some mid-1970s mountaineering notes

    

 

 

 My friend David Johnston passed away a couple weeks ago, alone in a small apartment on the 26^th floor of a Chicago high rise. A few more details are known, but like most of the rest of his life, these are not my stories to tell.

 

David was the brother/brother-in-law of my life-long close friends Margaret and Michael Schonhofen.  In 1975 the four of us left our suburban Midwestern homes and drove to Seattle to start new lives.  Shortly after arriving David became ill and drove straight back to the Midwest, where he mostly stayed.

 

David almost certainly could have lived longer had he taken better care of himself, but for whom among us is this not true?  He declined medical attention in his last days. I believe he expected to muddle through, independently, as he always did. But not this time.

 

I was remembering with Margaret and Michael a photograph I took of David and Mike after a day of skiing at Crystal Mountain in Washington.  I couldn’t remember exactly when I had taken it.  The day had been a spectacular and we had skied right up until the chairlifts stopped spinning. David held his skis in the air in a day-ending moment of exhilaration.

 

I decided I would look for that photograph in my archives.  This turned into a fairly deep dive.

 

My photographic slides are only somewhat organized. They have been kept dark and dry. I confined my search to three boxes, labeled: 

 

            • Mt. Rainier 1975–‘78

            • Pacific Northwest  1977–‘78

            • Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John

 

While I searched through these boxes I would keep an eye out for two other photos from the era, both missing for decades: a photo of John McInerney traversing across a knife-edged section of the north ridge of Mt Stuart (summer 1975), and a photo of Denny Cliff dwarfed by an enormous serac on the north side of Mt. Rainier in winter (early 1977).

 

After poring through these boxes I had some general thoughts:

 

1.      On every single wilderness outing with Mike we were entirely alone and very very far from the cars.

 

2.     The photographs from the first winter attempt on Liberty Ridge (Mt Rainier) look forensic, as if trying to piece together how exactly disaster had struck: blurry, snowy, little-to-no visibility, crevasses everywhere.  Disaster was averted, but you’d never really guess that from the photographic evidence.

 

3.     There’s a random photograph of me climbing a dark wet slab in mountain boots, a double rope trailing down, not a piece of protection in sight. No label. No memory of it.  Just sheer dumbness captured on film.

 

4.      Up to a certain point I was wearing cotton knickers. I shudder now to think of this.

 

5.     There were a number of photos of a winter climb Rainer Burgdorfer, Denny Cliff, and I attempted above the town of Darrington.  I remember this chiefly because the three of us were packed into Rainer’s VW beetle and we left Seattle in the pre-dawn darkness and Rainier kept sticking his head out the window to stay awake, shouting “I was made for this!” into the void. We never really were sure we were even on the right mountain.  I remember the climb as being an abject failure.  But I was astonished by the photographs: they showed we had gained much altitude, the river valley far far below us.  The landscape in the photographs is stark and foreboding.  In those days we were summit-driven and saw anything less as a kind of failure.  I look at the photos now and see wild untraveled country and an amazing experience.  I see our youth. 

 

6.     Despite that during this era my friend Roy was my most frequent climbing partner, there are very few photographs of our days together. Not sure why this is so. We were so into the actual climbing that documenting it was somehow beneath us?

 

I found a couple other photographs I had thought misplaced.  One is of Mike and me on the summit of Mt. Shuksan.  There are also three or four “rejected” summit photographs, as well.  These were self-timed, the camera balanced on a rock.  A lot of time was taken to make these.  It occurs to me now that these dallying moments contributed to our eventual descending in the dark, off trail in the Fisher Chimneys, rappelling from marginal gear and a prayer.

 

The other photo I hadn’t seen in a long time is a shot of me sitting on the summit block of Mt. Stuart.  I’m wearing my white Peter Storm sweater, the kind that smelled like lanolin, that I wore for years, until it became riddled with holes, shrunken and misshapen.  The way this photo later took on meaning was that my aunt had it displayed prominently in her house.  After she died her possessions went into an enormous estate sale.  I instructed my son, who attended as our representative, to find that photo.  But the estate sale was nightmarish and everything in the house had been removed from their places in the home and laid out for sale to strangers. He could never find it. I didn’t expect to ever see the image again.

 

I found the shot of John McInerney on the knife edged traverse section on the north ridge of Stuart.  The slide is damaged.  He is wearing his gold and navy striped cotton rugby shirt.  We spent an extra unplanned night out just below the summit, out of water, a small tin of mandarin oranges our only food.

 

I did not find the shot of Denny Cliff below the huge serac.  But I well remember the speed (and terror) with which we moved through that maze of ice.

 

Finally, I found the photo of David and Mike at Crystal.  It was in the most unlikely of the boxes, “Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John,” the most grab-bag-like of the group. The shot was a bit of a letdown, the memory far grander than the photographic record. It’s late afternoon and the scene is deeply enshadowed.  We are in a parking lot.  It’s Mike, not David, who is raising his skis in triumph, unrecognizable behind his ski goggles.  David on his right, smiling contentedly. I’m very glad to have found it.  Slides in those days had the processing date stamped on them: February 1979.  This day at Crystal Mountain, then, was just days before I left Washington state for southern California where I would stay for the next seven years. In other words, a momentous occasion in a young life.

 

If I could hold fast to another single moment of my times with David it would be from when we were driving west, caravanning.  David in his Pinto station wagon, me in my rusted-out Javelin, passenger door coat-hangar-wired together.  We didn’t worry whether these were road-worthy: David could fix anything with an engine. Late in one of the days, Montana, let’s say, David ahead of me, pulls over to the shoulder, flashers blinking.  I ease in behind him and he runs over and tells me to dial up a certain radio station. “They’re playing,” he said, “Rosemary, Lilly, and the Jack of Hearts.”  We drove off toward the setting sun, while Bob Dylan told us a story as we unspooled down the empty highway into the rest of our lives. 

 

The last time I saw David was back in Dearborn (Michigan) in 2012, the occasion, my father’s funeral.  I had left the funeral home to get some air and David appeared unexpectedly, freshly shaven in a razor-nicked face, a gift bottle of single malt in his hand. I had the feeling he had been waiting in his car in the parking lot for me to appear.

 

It’s a different bottle now, David, but I am raising this glass to you.

 

 

 

`

An Origin Story: the Detroit Institute of Arts

 

I was born in Detroit.  

 

Although I left there almost fifty years ago and the house I was raised in has been out of the family for decades, I still think of the place as home.  As Neil Young said, of “a town in north Ontario:” “All my changes were there.”  In my case, not all, but many, the typical changes one might experience by the age of twenty-two.  When I go back to Detroit, at least once a year, it’s to see the people. But two places, sacri loci, my sacred places, call me back: Sacred Heart on the corner of Military and Michigan Avenue where I went to school and mass and the Detroit Institute of Arts where I experienced the wonder of art for the first time.  On this recent trip COVID dashed most of my plans, but I did make it to the DIA. 

Though I had tested negative for days I was tired and spent more than a few minutes sitting on a bench in the Great Hall, an enormous room, mostly empty, that leads to another great hall that houses Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals.  I’ve never seen the DIA overly crowded the way the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago always are.  This despite that admission is free for residents of three counties.  As I sat there I watched the families taking advantage of this great gift.

From my seat at the bench I see a young girl, six years old maybe, a waif who has escaped her parents and sister.  She is attired in a faded print dress over colorful, albeit dingy, tights.  She is skipping down the center of the hall.  Suddenly she stops and stares at the art high on the wall. She is literally transfixed, awestruck, the thing on the wall has stopped her in her tracks. 

            The thing on the wall looks like an enormous piece of fabric, textile, a kind of Golden Fleece. But actually it is composed of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. It’s called “Amemo (Mask of Humankind)” and was made by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui.  Foe scale: if it were squared it would be about 25 feet by 25 feet.

            I am grateful to have observed this epiphanic moment.  Later I pointed the child out to my wife. Cute little ragamuffin, she said.

 

The first time I went to the DIA I was with John McInerney (with whom I would share a lifelong friendship.) I remember being stunned, my ragamuffin-in-awe moment, to see Frederic Church’s “Syria by the Sea,” an enormous painting of dramatic golden light and ruins. It’s still in the collection, but somewhat overwhelmed by another smaller, more famous, Church painting  “Cotopaxi,” which was added to the collection in 1976 five years after our first visit.  Cotopaxi is also full of light and fire, kind of portrait of the earth being born.  Aside: at some time in the last decade John made an attempt to climb Cotopaxi, turned back, as I recall, by altitude sickness.

 

A work I had never seen before was “Family Album (Blood Objects) Exhibit F: Shirt, 1993, Yoko Ono, American; bronze with blue and red patina, on hanger.” I should first state that I was never really a Beatles fan, and certainly not a Yoko Ono fan.   But inarguably Beatles’ music would be feature hugely in the soundtrack of my life. As with Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger debacle, I remember clearly where I was when I heard the news that John Lennon had been murdered. 

This sculpture is a facsimile of the denim shirt Lennon was wearing when he was shot, complete with bullet holes and blood.  At first I thought it was the actual shirt, then I thought no, a kind of copy. I was stunned to realize it was made of bronze.  I would have sworn it was cloth.

Looking around for a potential witness and seeing none, I actually, furtively, touched it. Bronze.  It was like touching the hem of saint’s gown.  Incredible. 

 

Finally, I made my way to the Rivera room. If you’ve never seen this, I recommend a visit to Detroit for this sole purpose.  The murals, 27 of them, fill four walls of a large room, so that when you stand in the center it’s as if you have been absorbed into Rivera’s universe.  Rivera painted these in 1932–’33, financed controversially by Edsel Ford. It’s hard to summarize as its messages are many: a celebration of the worker, a critique of capitalism and the war machine, an alert to the poisoning of the environment. It contains multitudes, as Whitman would have had it.

A large part of my love for these murals has to do with the fact that I, like the factory workers Rivera portrayed, worked at “the Rouge,” or, more precisely, Ford’s Dearborn Stamping Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. My job on the assembly line was similar to the one portrayed here:

 

I operated a spot-welding machine.  It was mind-numbingly repetitive and dangerous work. With every weld a stream of sparks, much like the ones Rivera painted, shot out from the weld points, once nearly blinding me and more than once lighting my hair afire. At the time I was not yet conscious of living inside the Riveraian universe, but when I look at the murals now they seem highly personal.  

With the money I made on the assembly line I travelled to Mexico City (the Rivera murals were not part of this decision-making process yet) where I gathered material for a book that I, for some unfounded reason, thought I would write and where I discovered Rivera in his homeland. I did not write that book. But decades later I would write a novel that was set in Mexico City in which the main character inspired by the Industry Murals is a student researcher studying Rivera’s works. The murals function as the occasion that launches the plot of the story.

 

On this visit I focus on the scene, high on the east wall, of an unborn infant in utero, being nourished by the earth. That’s me, I thought, I was born here.