Places We’ve Been (1 of 3)

There’s a place we’ve all been where we don’t see and don’t experience ourselves there, but the place is only a certain view upon a space where there is movement that is blind, such as the sound of vehicles swishing through air.  Movement of traffic, one car and then another, passing through our view, a woman crossing at the intersection, but just so that what we possess is a space from which we can gather only the image of a moment there, perhaps that moment, and maybe even the next, being in and of that place, but such a moment being of and for itself rather than for us and our experience (with not even the hint of a question of why, there and then, it should be for us).

I’m talking about looking out from Boundary Avenue onto Broadway Street West from where I now gather I once parked my car some time in the recent or distant past.  But I’ve never had this particular view of that space before.  It presents itself as meaningless, an image filled in by my mind, but it makes for a perfect image of some moment that exists with myself within it but entirely beyond me.  One view onto a main street in a small town that I might now carry with me wherever I go.  Why would I though?  I can’t really enter it, but can only see out this “window” I’ve just described.  The sunlight is “august” in this image—I’d rather call it “marigold,” and I then know it had been a hot day and was becoming a hot and humid evening.  Anything beyond the image would be to invent, perhaps even to create.  But let’s not—and let’s move on nonetheless.  Why are we doing this?  Perhaps to bring forth an initial quality—perhaps it is only a “beginning”–in asking what else we might remember about this town.

You could get in your car and travel down Broadway Street West, which would mean you were then going east to west or west to east.  West to east: Are you leaving this town so soon?  East to west: Have you remembered needing something in this place?  What could you possibly need?  There are only two or three places you are likely to go, only two or three places where you would find anything you’d need.  Two of those places are located off one of the avenues running south.  You’ve decided to go to that other place, by heading east on Broadway West.  Why are you suddenly in a rush?  Why do you have somewhere you feel you need to be, when you know very well there is nowhere like this, no place that can be defined as: “You need to Be Here”?  No place like that for you, at least not today.

People sure drive slowly in this town.  You feel frustration grip you and you urge patience on yourself, like trying to fit a simple key into what by all appearances is a complex lock.  You’ve been to many towns, and no one has ever gone twenty-five kilometres an hour down the streets, and this really now seems like the local custom here.  And the old, steaming buildings begin to droop like sad faces all around you, as you must now take everything in, each moment slowing down to mire you in memory.  To let the fallen and dying have their moment, their place within you too.  So it’s true that you’ve been to this town many times before.  But you can’t really “know” the town, you need to remind yourself.  You now know this much at least.  You won’t let memory in just yet–you’ve let go of that initial image, and now memory itself wants to gather you around itself, as though memory is a bonfire gathering people of different places around itself, with different experiences of those places, to elicit something out of the impressions you would be forming of them, out of what your senses would convey about them to you.  You are able to block it though because the people around here can’t possibly have faces you could know just yet, you not being of their town or their lives within it.  Do people’s faces not come partly from memory, from remembered experience?  Does it matter where people’s faces come from?  Does it matter to you?  It does, it does.  People’s faces might simply be the impression left in yourself by others resembling them (in life, on television, in movies, so across remembered images).  So you shouldn’t assume that the faces you see are those people’s faces at all.

You enter the parking lot of where you intend to stop for a few things.  You allow yourself to remember exactly what these things are.  And everything is where you expect to find it on the shelves.  You just grab and put each item into your basket.  You’ve been here before.  You head up to the front to pay.  The newspaper they still sell on the wire stands is a local paper—from another city though, from somewhere entirely different.  There is nothing with which to concern yourself there—news sure does travel fast!  It even makes a sound like, neeewwvs!  Newve, like “nerve.”  Or the sound of a revving engine.  The newvs of our interwoven bodies politic, connected as this can be to our own nerves and accustomed sense of “being here.”  Such daily happenings–such patterns, revelations, and revolutions, this is true–once spoke to your own sense of being here.  But here is no longer there, and “there” is certainly not here.  You are suddenly thankful for towns like this one.  You brighten somewhat, and you pay, and the exceedingly pleasant young woman wishes you a pleasant day.  “A pleasant day to to you, too,” you say.  She returns your smile, and you can see that she has a beautiful face all her own (not seeming at all the stuff of your own “archival memory”).  You decide to let one memory in, and you know that it is a memory that goes further back than what you initially thought of as the image of a moment on Boundary Avenue.  That had a special timbre, you remember.  And this newest memory, this newest image?  There also, you were partly outside where you thought you were, and you have all sorts of perfect images like this, perfectly formed and crystalline like you truly were there—and so you were there in a sense—but they are perfect also for no longer being anywhere at all but where the moments that follow and encrust their own special qualities further place you.