smokerings

[ i do not know what it is ]

It's raining in Madison. Poetry is easier to get away with these days, it doesn't require explanations or evoke criticism in the same way that prose does. M read two passages from Kundera last night, I thought of Szymborska and worried about the recurrence of experience and realised that she was alseep.

The Premise.

At about the same time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight. After a month or two, she reminded him of one of their earlier encounters: they had made love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside; they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably beautiful!
Tomas was appalled. Yes, he remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It was odd. He could recall each of their times together; he had even kept close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind); he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she would ask him to squeeze her hips and stop looking at her all the time); he even remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.
Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.
The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
By the word “non-love” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was him memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknownst to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.
Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.

Finally,

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a (wo)man enters her first word into our poetic memory.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

..or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Such small hands, in the rain, in thunderstorms, that experience. Of flesh, friendship, idiocy. Those mistake(s), the ones that gnaw deep inside your belly, hound you with shame and regret. And then I emerge from this dream, look at the piles of letters and articles and multiple regressions around me and remark that the rain has frozen, M, shouldn't we...
Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the intense fragile stupidity of love. Of children, lying in bed, tumbling naked and flushed with enough poetry that when he touches her, when her mouth whispers close to his neck she says the voice of your eyes is... of course, wonderful and stupid.