I am the least memorable person, in person, you have ever forgotten that you met. I combine the pot belly and bland unattractiveness of a farm supply agent with the incongruous egoism of an autodidact’s vocabulary, although I lack the breeding of the first and the confidence of the second. I abound in Beta male pheromones as well. This is something that mattered and annoyed a lot during breeding season, but I am aware of the self I inhabit now and am resigned to my inability to show my beautiful soul and iron-shod masculinity through the veil of flesh and senses. Forgettable, that’s what I am.
On the other hand, what is memorable, what sticks out in memory, is mysterious. Oh, there are obvious things. The momentous is memorable. The affecting is, by definition (“definition,” mind you), imprinted on a person and worn in the memory of a person’s emotions, body, or intellect. However, there are these other things that become so memorable that they stand out like rocks in a plowed field, incongruous and inexplicable.
Some odd snatches of childhood detritus, some filings from culture, and some accidents of conversation or slips of the parental tongue can immediately claim the child’s memory, the young adult’s attention. They grow mythic and organize experience and knowledge around themselves. They stand like maypoles at the center of a dance of irrational pattern-making, and there is no way, seemingly, to tell why one phrase or image flings itself to the center of the mind or when it will happen.
For one person, a first cousin’s inappropriate leering is an embarrassing joke. For another person, it is a trauma that makes sexuality frightening. The stimulus/provocation is the same, but the place and shape in memory is completely different. For one Sunday School camper, the story of Balaam’s Ass was just a construction paper cut-outs poster they did, where each kid got a little donkey and a little angel and drew the road. For another camper, the exact words of the Bible go into long term memory, and an enchanted donkey who can see angels becomes the kernel of a lifelong belief that animals see the divine. It’s the same stimulus.
I remember, when I was fifteen or sixteen, watching, and then reading, Peter Shaffer’s Equus. We had HBO, and I was at the perfect age for the perfect timing to find the full frontal nudity of Jenny Agutter (playing Jill Mason) the most amazing thing ever, especially as she had won me with the imperfect aristocratic beauty. (I apologize, but I was fifteen. At that age, a man will latch onto a visible hemline at a funeral. We are, as Sophocles is supposed to have said, victims of “a strange and frenzied master.” The slavery does not end for decades.) Shaffer’s play is concerned with this very enigma: why do people, and especially psychotics, grab this detail to seed their delusions? Why does this experience get the power to reorganize the world into a myth? (The play doesn’t really recognize the difference between a paranoid schizophrenic and a merely weird or eccentric individual, but that’s because it was chasing an Idea, or a few of them.)
Why, in one young woman’s paranoid delusions, does a fantasy world begun in romantic heroes and heroines get to gather up all the details of everyday life and recast them as a part of a malignant plot? When a paranoid schizophrenic featured on a “Frontline” episode spoke of how the voices did not want him to reveal, “That I am the father of the most high God and the devil has three means to punish us: the needle, the feather, and the rope,” why did those three objects get magnetized and placed at the center of a dialectic of sin? When did those images gain such power for him, and why those?
I’m sure that we can answer the question mechanistically, with neutrotransmitters and gene expression — particular genes being switched on at a particular time and particular chemicals. “Superfluity” and “deficit” of neurotransmitters now explain moods just the way that once the four humours did. However, I’m not sure that these are explanations of causes as much as observations of phenomena. Then again, I’m pure laity. Possibly wiser minds have it all figured out by now.
However it happens, when particular unplanned fragments combine and become guiding metaphors, a person’s life changes in a small or large way producing prejudice, trauma, phobia, or something odder.
When I was a little kid, a very little kid, I had open heart surgery. It was 1969, so they were early days. (The heart-lung machine as we know it was finalized around 1964.) The survival rate for the surgery I had was around 20%. At age seven, I had my heart removed, vessels opened, a valve cut, and then the whole thing put back in — only to develop a deep vein thrombosis in the subfemoral vein and go into a three week coma.
Before the surgery, well-wishers had given me many, many things to help me understand what was happening. (Ok?) One of those was a “visible heart with real pumping action” that always leaked (just like my heart valve after the surgery (which was still better than being completely occluded, which is what it was before)). It was two panes of transparent plastic, like a Duchamp piece, close together, with red water between and a tube attached and a yellow plastic bellows that the young scientist would squeeze to make the ‘heart’ pump.
Those clear plastic tubes and yellow plastic bellows zapped my brain. They hammered out a crazy armory of crazy.
After the surgery, I had blood tests and IV’s put in all the time. My veins weren’t holding up. I remember one intern missing the vein so often that he pulled the vein up with one needle to hit it with another. I had tubes . . . tubes. . . and more tubes, all going out of me. I never thought of them as going into me, but only out, because if they went into me, they would corrupt my core self. I saw all of these lines going from me, and I began to think that any physical contact, any touch, left an invisible tube that drained the soul and contaminated the self. In my mind, hugs were impossible. Handshakes required breaking the tubes off immediately afterward. Other people, I thought, were hopelessly controlled and drained. I imagined spider webs draped around people as they were drained by space aliens. Worse, I was shocked that they touched objects, connecting themselves to those objects with tubes, and then they spilled their essence out on the ground. My seven year old imagination came up with a fairly pedestrian name for the space alien vampires, “Tubulizers,” but I knew that wasn’t their real name.
Here’s the weird thing: I kept the belief, in spite of knowledge of its absurdity, in spite of knowing better, in spite of even knowing where the belief came from, into my twenties. Knowing better is little help against centralized metaphors. I wouldn’t touch things or, especially, people. This dragon of the imagination was too powerful to evade, and I couldn’t tell anyone about it, either. Nevertheless, no one noticed. I was not even eccentric.
Now, let me go back a bit to those years when I was in thrall to the master, adolescence. In my teen years, I was driven to seek fame. I wanted to be remembered, and I wanted to create an impression. My body was fighting me, and my absolute lack of charisma was a serious hindrance, but I couldn’t help it. The master lashed, and I obeyed. Like all young men, all impulses owed their wellspring to hormones. Once, I even visited another town and consciously attempted to be enigmatic. It worked. I became a Mysterious Person a little knot of teens would remember.
Almost immediately after, and ever after, I felt sick with regret and shame. I knew that fakes were everywhere, that they were rewarded for their fraud, and I had just become one.
Years later, my music career led me to be gorged on quasi-fame. I had found my depth and seen how little meritocracy exists in the arts, and I came to my present position. It is not enough to be honest: being memorable is a horrible thing. It is a responsibility too great for any failed human to consciously engineer or allow. Only fools, slaves, and maniacs would seek to make a lasting impression. How frightful to cause some other person’s mythology, to create another person’s exaggerated reaction, to be responsible for another being’s fretful passage!
Being forgettable, at least in person, is fine. I may be captive to misperceptions and misprision, but no one else will be afflicted by the horror of being unforgettable.