The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók is gorgeous.

I’ll say it again: gorgeous. I never thought I’d find a book where how it was written interested me more than its content (a staple of my recreational reading diet being sci-fi novels), so this was an illuminating experience. So lovingly crafted is each chapter, tailored exceptionally to fit her story, that it almost feels as if the whole thing were imagined, lived vicariously through the characters on the page. What I’m trying to say is that Bartók writes very well. Almost too well…

Wait a second. This is a memoir, isn’t it? Well, she writes about growing up living with her manic depressive, schizophrenic mom, and how that affected her as an adult, and how she dealt with her mom as an adult. That all seems pretty autobiographical. It’s not a boring account, by any means, but how did she make me care, right from the first few pages? I’ve read biographies about Dave Grohl and Bill Watterson, icons of worlds I had dreams of living in. I’ve read memoirs by Steve Martin and Anthony Bourdain, guys I occasionally crush on. Mira Bartók was a name completely new to me until I picked up this book, and if all she was selling were bittersweet memories of a saga maybe a fraction of the population can relate to, what kept me turning pages until I couldn’t keep my eyes open in morning’s earliest hours?

First of all, peoples’ memories aren’t what they used to be. Joshua Foer writes in Moonwalking With Einstein how, in the time before mass production of books was possible, scholars had no choice but to memorize the information passed on to them by their mentors: “Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.” Nowadays, people may use any number of memory aides, depriving their brains of the mental exercises it would take in order to remember just about everything. As fickle as the memory is for most of us, Bartók still provides astoundingly vivid episodes from her childhood. Even more impressive is that she does this after suffering a brain injury from a car accident in 1999. If I try and remember anything from the year I was eight years old, I first have to figure out what grade I was in, from there deduce who my friends were, then look up those friends on Facebook so I can just ask them what they remember.

Bartók addresses the hazy nature of memories early and often. In the first chapter, titled “Subterranean World,” she begins to describe the psychological process that inspired her to record what she remembers of her mother:

            Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. But neuroscientists say that is how memory works—it is complex and mercurial, a subterranean world that changes each time we drag something up from below. (29)

However, this understanding doesn’t stop her from second guessing her recollections in later chapters. When her and her mother are separated in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Bartók remembers not quite believing her mother could abandon her, but she knew, even at the age of nine, that her mother couldn’t be held completely responsible for her actions. She comes up with three scenarios that “could have happened,” never really committing to any one over the others. Two of the options outline a relieved yet guilt-stricken mother reuniting with her scared daughter, and a simple miscommunication, but everything leading up to this point suggests the third option as the true memory: “Cleveland is burning all around us in the sixties; the world is on fire—the river, the dying lake, my mother’s beautiful brain.”

The complexity of a web of memories fashioned thru ought a lifetime is incomprehensible. What clever Bartók does to arrange her book is utilize the very mnemonic device she uses to organize her memory. After finding hope for her untrustworthy memory in her knack for the visual arts, she builds herself a memory palace. This age-old technique allows a person to affix an image of what they’re trying to remember to a room in an imaginary building; by walking through the palace in her mind, Bartók is able to relive moments with her mother. Each chapter opens with a new addition to her palace, and as I said before, the narrative flows smoothly as Bartók connects images to memories and never is a metaphor forgotten. In the chapter called the “Eye of Goya,” we learn through a common interest that she is very much her mother’s daughter: “My mother and I loved artists and famous people who suffered from horrible afflictions, like Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank.”

So, whether or not Bartók has a really good memory is beside the point, because what she’s done with her memories provides the best evidence of her book being an exemplary work of creative nonfiction. Mimi Schwartz tells her students in the essay “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” to “go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters.” This is exactly what Bartók does. I can accept the brilliantly crafted prose now that I see how the author used her gifted imagination to sharpen the edges of fuzzy memories. I don’t know why I doubted its authenticity in the first place.

Barbarians Are Closing In (Revision)

The barbarians are getting closer every second. They don’t leave until they get what they want; usually gold, but sometimes they take those left alive who would make decent slaves. My work is nearly complete. It must be hidden, kept safe. I regret to say that in my moment of panic I scratch out a line that may be deemed out of place next to the inspired illustrations of previous passages:

            shit. my boss. talk to ya later :-/

“You’re certainly not texting up here, right? You have work to do, and there’s customers to keep an eye on…?” Damn, she’d seen me slip the cell phone into my pocket.

“Oh yea, of course. Just, uh, checking the time. Thought our clock looked a little off,” I stammer.

“I see. Well, perhaps I can get Cody to move those boxes, since you have things to do up here…?” It’s sometimes difficult to tell if she’s still talking to an underling like me or to herself, but she’s ending her sentences like a question so I feel like I have to justify my existence.

“Mmmmyea! There’s this catalog to go through and a bit of labeling…books to shelve…” She nods, stares blankly, mutters something about what she came up there for, and leaves. It hadn’t been the first time my state of lazy comfort had been raided by a marauding micro-manager, and it wouldn’t be the last. I lean against the counter and pray my friend Cody makes it out alive.

My boss had only caught me in the middle of making plans for the weekend, a fate much gentler than those of the tenth century Celtic monks who were victims of Viking attacks. Believing a raid to be a challenge to battle rather than stealing, the Vikings looted villages for food, precious metals, livestock, people, and killed whoever stood in their way. Peaceful settlements like the Abbey of Kells in Ireland never stood a chance. However, the monks were able to keep their greatest work from being plundered: an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels of the New Testament.

The Book of Kells is a work by generations of master calligraphers, and the ultimate reference for the winding art motifs we’ve come to know as Celtic knots and crosses. It’s Ireland’s greatest national treasure and has been kept at Trinity College in Dublin since 1661, just out of reach of drooling bibliophiles and historians. This vibrant example of language was the result of patience, skill and divine inspiration. If everyone today had the motivation of the monks who withstood beatings from merciless killers, what would our writing look like?

Conversations thumbed between cell phones these days could never match the beauty of an illuminated manuscript. Text messages get deleted to make room for more text messages; perhaps such a disposable nature suppresses the urge to make them as enduring as anything hand-written. The Book of Kells is written in Latin, a language considered to be “dead.” If languages can die, how long before the short-hand elegance I’ve learned only from years of instant messaging gets put down? I can’t possibly let a younger, more adorable lingo warm the hearts of writers in my lifetime, so I prefer to view each instantaneous transmission as a new opportunity to link the vernacular of my generation with the careful passion of someone who has imported pigments from far off lands to mix into a brilliant ink.

The clever faces built from the available symbols on a keyboard—known as emoticons or smileys—retain a level of punctuation that, when understood, can convey a lot. Despite being knocked over onto their side, smileys offer facial expression where it normally isn’t seen.

Hey! Whats up? :)

The plain smile shows that I’m genuinely interested in how a person’s day was, even if what I really want is to get on their good side so I can ask them to drive somewhere.

Wow thats awesome! :D

I’ll use the grin if, and only if, I think the person is going to share any of their awesome with me.

:(

That’s sad; I have been upset. Maybe they’re keeping that awesome all to their self.

:-*

Kisses go to the one I love. End of story.

;-)

However, I am generous with my winks….

:P

and the sarcastic sticking out of the tongue.

Emoticons illuminate the tiny backlit screens that glow against our faces in shadowy corners. They articulate feeling in a way that the limited field of text messaging can’t, and since texting has become such a popular way of communicating, we need all the varied methods of expression we can get. The monks at the Abby of Kells knew the power of illustration, knew that it could lift up the word of God so that even those who could not read could be aware of the Almighty. Plus, it states in the Bible that God made humans in his likeness; why squint to make out the face of Jesus in rock formations and grilled cheese sandwiches when it can easily be constructed from an assortment of punctuation marks?

Texting has a chokehold on our culture. If people really are losing the ability to socialize face-to-face, we can at least still write meaningful things to each other.

:) (Workshop Essay)

“Shrimp dinner tomorrow?” she asks with a parenthesis smile.

“Sounds great,” I exclaim with a wide grin, “Are you going to be hungry tonight?”

“No,” she admits, mouth an apologetic slash, “You will be tho!”

“Mhm! I’m going to devour you,” I throw a halo above my head for good measure.

Her lips form a capital O before shifting into that perfectly curved smile. She’s a master of playing it cool.

Conversations thumbed between cell phones these days never match the poetry of, say, letters written by Civil War soldiers to their loved ones in the late eighteen hundreds, but that doesn’t mean any less thought should go into them.

Ever since the dawn of man there have been people who’ve had something to say, though, not necessarily out loud. Long before the correspondences of Union and Confederate soldiers, and even longer before text messages, people were tapping out words on stone tablets or scratching them over papyrus. Laws, histories, poems, contracts, anything ancient note takers wanted records of would be inscribed on material that could be preserved for ages. In a time before data plans, hot spots and an ever growing amount of Gs, Mother Nature was the only mobile provider.

No doubt written language has come a long way since the pictographs that first conveyed meaning within early societies, yet it has always been said that history has a way of repeating itself. Emoticons, abbreviations or icons used on computer networks, specifically Smileys, may someday become the hieroglyphics that archaeological theses are written about. This idea alone drives me to compose texts (of the cell phone variety) that express exactly what I mean with the kind of short-hand elegance learned only from years of instant messaging.

To some lack-luster texters, punctuation has been devalued to a mere forgotten courtesy. Crude, single sentence memos hold the greatest chances of being misconstrued, so if this is how you prefer to communicate, you may have already had problems. It’s heartbreaking to see such a paltry response from someone you were eager to here from. Punctuation is defined as using “marks or characters in writing or printing in order to separate elements and make the meaning clear,” and how hard could it be to spice up your message with one or two extra characters?

The clever faces built from the available symbols on the keyboard are the next level of punctuation one can utilize to communicate how they feel. Despite being knocked over onto their side, Smileys offer facial expression where it normally isn’t seen. There’s the plain :) that makes you glad to have a friend. A grinning :D lets you know that you’ve brightened someone’s day by making them laugh. :( isn’t something you enjoy seeing, but people get sad sometimes. Hopefully you can turn that conversation around so they’re back to sending :-* and ;-). These are the simplest examples; there are a myriad of combinations and illustrations, but it doesn’t take jaw-dropping creativity to illuminate the tiny backlit manuscript that glows against your face in the back of a classroom :-O.

Text messages get deleted to make room for more text messages; perhaps such a disposable nature suppresses the urge to make them as enduring as a hand-written letter. It’s depressing to think about, so I prefer to view each instantaneous transmission as a new opportunity to link the vernacular of my generation with the careful passion of an old-fashioned gentleman caller.

I swear I'm trying to be an adult, I'm just not very good at it.

The lane of cement stretches forever between towering shelves of home appliances and fixtures; thousands upon thousands of pounds of material and hardware for whatever jobs need doing. I only get a few feet down the aisle before it all comes crashing down on top of me.

Well, figuratively.

Despite the overwhelming amount of mass stacked high above customers’ heads, my mind is strangely soothed while walking through any home improvement super center such as Lowe’s or Home Depot. Traveling through the different departments one time, I began to notice an overpowering theme to my daydreams, as if each display I passed projected a ghostly vision of the future straight into my brain. From monolithic laundry machines to Pac-man-mouthed barbecues, I saw a life--with a wife, maybe a baby on the way, always a dog--that mine had the potential to become. A contentedly suburban existence.

It seems harsh to call these images hallucinations, but I just can’t shake the feeling that they were produced by something other than my own imagination. Somewhere a tiny network of gremlins was working to spread prophecies of Everyday Low Prices in the time it took customers to wander a few aisles: analysts peer down from the upper shelves and print out graphs to be glanced at by the marketing team arguing in the rafters about directions the company should be going, and the writers hunch over laptops behind the garden department (it’s the only place they’re allowed to smoke), punching out scripts for the directors whose crews rig the sets in human imaginations using the latest in ethereal production technology. Academy Awards are held weekly in a tub on exhibit in the bath department.

Once I started to realize how much I was dwelling on such a happy, ordinary future, I was immediately unsoothed and set my sights on the exit. Maybe the reason these stores feel so venomous to me is the way they seem to be trying to coax me into settling down; I was trapped in some web where a spider’s bite was liquefying my dreams of travel and worldly experience. Maybe I’m just not old enough to appreciate the convenience of these places.

I’m no homemaker. My girlfriend wonders how I live the way I do: sharing a drafty apartment with three other college-age dudes. The bathroom’s tub, toilet and sink are smeared with grime and the roving puddle on the floor could’ve escaped from any one of them. Our landlord was more than a little incredulous when we told him Ricky wasn’t drunk when he pushed the hole through the shower wall, which is absolutely true: the rot holding up the pink tile squares just wasn’t strong enough for him to put his hand against while he scrubbed his foot. Pretending a couple of living room windows are instead dramatic photos of arcing lightning is easy, with their cracks that race up the panes, but you have to peek between the strips of duct tape. The microwave looks like a violent crime scene and the stove top smokes, charring the remains of whatever was spilled on it and not cleaned up. Walking around without shoes is never a recommendation, unless you’re in my room, where I made it a rule.

I wonder the same thing my girlfriend does as I dig into the mountain of dirty dishes with a soap-logged sponge, but not for too long. Before moving into this place we signed a piece of paper saying we’d give it back on Graduation Day, and since this time around it really would be graduation day for us, we’re planning on not wanting the apartment back. No matter how many times we say to each other “Let’s go home” after a night out, we still only feel like we’re referencing where the rest of our stuff and beds happen to be. A real home wouldn’t feel so temporary.

Someday I’ll be happy to drool all over power tools. I’m going to be so ready to feign disinterest when the ol’ lady and I are browsing around for a new kitchen (why the hell wouldn’t I want a dishwasher?). A family to raise, that’s why I would have nice things. The members of the odd, loud, frequently gross family I’m a part of now all have jobs so they can provide for themselves; when I finally feel like I’m mature enough to contribute to a real home, I won’t hesitate to sign up for whatever credit cards necessary to get the best deals on whatever it is that can make that happen.

Not Sure Pedagogy is My Thang

I’m honestly still not sure what I was expecting when I designed a writing exercise for my non-fiction class. I brought in a bunch of magazines that I hoped would inspire and focus their creativity. The only rules I had were to not write about the actual magazine, or about the experience of reading it. I meant to get everyone thinking like freelance-writers, contributing to the publication they held in their hands. I probably could’ve been clearer on that point, but everybody had interesting things to say.

It would’ve been nice to have everyone flipping through the same magazine, but I couldn’t obtain that many copies of any particular one so we made due with a variety. The exercise still seemed to succeed in providing my classmates subject matter to write about. In the end, I really appreciated the professor’s view that I had generated a reminder of how much in this world there truly is to write about.

And I learned a ton about the Morgan horse breed.

With an Earnest Desire to Preserve the Peace of a Graveyard--Workshop Essay

On November 19th, 1890, Horatio N. Beach published in his newspaper, the Brockport Republic, a circular announcing the beginning stages of the establishment of the Brockport Rural Cemetery:

With an earnest desire to establish in Brockport a cemetery that will honor it; with an earnest desire to obtain in a Brockport cemetery a lot for myself and lineal kindred that shall have an assured guarantee of perpetual care, I have been prompted to take an active part in the enterprise of establishing a new cemetery here.

By November 5th the following year, seventeen people had been interred in the little cemetery, and according to the newspaper, "the remains of the first soldier buried there were those of Michael Englehof." Around this time a movement for the construction of a soldiers monument was under way. Similar interest for such a monument had been noted in the past, but for various reasons the idea was never fully realized. It wasn't until the spring of 1891, when the Brockport Rural Cemetery Association gave a site for the purpose--"generally conceded to be one of the finest in the State"--that the plans for a memorial to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers started to come together.

A 1954 photocopied photograph acts as a cover page for "A Debt to Michael," a term paper written by James Belmont Johnson, a student at the State University College at Brockport, sometime in the year 1964. The photo shows the dark presence of a stone tower and some distant trees against a bright sky barely smudged by cloud. The tower doesn’t just stand in the open field, it possesses it, claims the space so that it may be seen for miles. It seems complete. Fifty-seven years later, the line of trees has caught up, and surpassed, the medina sandstone column. Ten or twelve feet have crumbled from the top, making the Brockport Soldiers Memorial Tower easy to miss, unless you know where to look.

What I had been looking for was something other than asphalt to ride my bike on. I needed dirt, wet or dry, lumped with rocks and logs and exposed roots. The ragged path that peeks through the brush along the east side of Owens Road near the train tracks can be a hassle to spot if you don't remember exactly where it is, but I figured it might have just what I needed.

Many times now have I plunged into those woods at the point halfway between the railroad tracks and a weathered plywood sign urging passer-by to donate money to "Save the Brockport Tower." Over the beaten grass and between grasping thorn bushes, I crank closer to the little clearing where the tower seems to step out from behind the trees. It still reaches into the sky as if nobody's told it that it was slowly falling apart. In the serenity of the forest, everything that the memorial could need saving from, even time, is forgotten.

Included in the book Images of America: Around Brockport by William G. Andrews, is a rendering of the tower that most closely matches how it looked at the time of its dedication on September 1st, 1893, which, Andrews writes, was "one of the grandest ceremonies in the town's history." The cylinder of stone ballooned into a sturdy looking battlement near the top, and visitors could climb a winding iron staircase all the way up where the eye was treated to a three-hundred-sixty degree view of beautiful countryside. Being so close to the train track, the tower became a scenic attraction along the route of the New York Central Railroad. Passenger trains would make a brief stop during their journey to allow people to get out and admire the stoic memorial.

And stoic the memorial remains, despite its situation: a monument built as a reminder of the past has become a ruin that each incoming generation of Brockport will know less and less about. It's there to be discovered by any adventurous youth, much to the distress of parents. "I'd be careful climbing around that thing," a young geo-cacher once told my friend and I out in those woods, "My dad says it's bound to come down any day now." Yet the odd visitor to the decaying tower may still aspire to reach its peak. The staircase is almost unrecognizable, having rusted away to a single, busted shaft, leaning against the inside wall. Needless to say, getting to the top would be too difficult for anyone but an experienced mountain climber. Moments have been scratched into the rock, scrawlings such as "Ben was here!" or "Mike + Ally 4ever," but a few names are up out of reach, marking progress towards the hole into the sky. If not for a panoramic view of a historic canal-side town, the arduous ascent would be worth it to get away from the ground where broken glass and an aluminum can or two lay as evidence of some misguided get-together. Suppose the monument did come tumbling down: no longer could it be used for all the wrong reasons, and, if it happened at just the right moment, a pair of young lovers could get their wish under a pile of rubble.

Michael Englehof is still buried out there, along with William Castleman, both soldiers who didn’t have family to move their remains to a better cemetery when the people who had guaranteed the “perpetual care” Horatio Beach specified in his original address faded away like the veterans they were meant to honor. Unlike people, history has a way of burying itself as more and more events take place in time. People like Jacquelyn Morris, a card carrying village historian at the Emily L. Knapp Museum and Library on State Street, along with friends Rayleen Bucklin and Dan Burns, take it upon themselves to excavate the past as it becomes distant, even though the slow process of organizing the information and artifacts they’ve collected make it hard to keep up with the ever-developing saga of Brockport.

“Don’t we owe him something?” James Belmont Johnson asks in his term paper, referring to the long dead soldier Michael Englehof. Like many other past attempts, Johnson’s urge to repair and preserve the Soldiers Memorial Tower didn’t garner the interest necessary to restore it to its former glory. As a member of this latest generation to come across the monstrous relic, to dig through its history, to relish the peace and quiet of the forest in which it stands, I find myself not particularly wanting to see it as it once was, but defended as it is now. Respect may still be shown to the memorial and the heroes it represents. Time will continue to ravage the proud tower, whether we want it to or not, but hopefully the layers of dust that our moments with it leave behind aren’t enough to bring it down anytime soon.

Saving for Retirement

At twenty-two years old, one should have some common sense. Night follows day, angry insides and a hammering headache come after a night of social drinking, simple things like that. This particular twenty-two year old was aware of those very facts when he decided to accept an invitation to attend his first bar crawl. Friday night found him scuttling from bar to bar in an unfamiliar city amongst a crowd of like-minded university urchins, heavy with the knowledge that he was expected at work, an hour and a half's drive east, by nine thirty the next morning.

But my first bar crawl! Red X's on a pocket map marked locations already magnetized by outstanding neon and sound and drink specials. Ladies pumped fountains of charm and influence, gentlemen were simultaneously romantic and predatory. You can try keeping your guard up against having too much fun; safely swaying to the music on your own, sticking to the shade of friendly conversation with familiar faces, but eventually that guard stumbles back to your friend's place, to pass out, contact lenses slowly drying against its corneas.

At twenty-two years old I know wisdom is gained through experience. It's my civic duty to act my age now, if only so future generations of hooligans have a chatty, old codger to look up to someday. Luckily, the worst that's ever come of that has been handing out a few too many pennies making change at the register on a painfully bright Saturday morning.