ben weissman was putting together a writers series for the armand
hammer museum in the summer and wanted to know if id be willing to
do a talk piece in july i said sure as long as i could do it on july
14 id always wanted to do a talk on bastille day because the idea
of liberation still appealed to me but when the program came out it
seemed i was scheduled for the twenty-first i thought about
protesting but decided there was a message in the mix up so i decided
to forget about liberation which often turns out badly anyway and
thought about the hammer museum its located on wilshire close
to ucla which its now a part of and i considered how often and
repeatedly id traveled back and forth to los angeles in the years since
we moved to san diego
when we first came out here san diego seemed very far from los
angeles to reach the great metropolis you had to drive past long
stretches of empty orange county citrus groves and hop and strawberry
fields sheltered from the coastal winds by thin stands of ragged
eucalyptus but gradually this changed one day a sign appeared
over a new exit from the 405 it read MISSION VIEJO
implausibly because there was no mission there or anything else
weird glass buildings began to appear in the hop fields hillsides were
flattened for cookie cutter housing and after a while orange county
began to look like an l.a. suburb meanwhile in the south encinitas
gave up its hillside flower fields for "cape cod" style condos scruffy
oceanside took down its tourist welcoming sign COME TAN YOUR
HIDE IN OCEANSIDE and we were all los angeles now from wilshire
boulevard down to the mexican border
what happened to walter?
i came here with something on my mind something ive been
thinking about for a while and thinking about it i havent been able
to resolve it its a question thats been addressed by a lot of people
whether there is such a thing as repetition and how we should think
about it if there is such a thing and even if there isnt
now ive thought about it a number of times which already
suggests there is such a thing but its an old problem that goes back a
very long time in european thought if you consider turkey part of
europe because herakleitos lived in ephesus on the western coast
of turkey during the persian domination toward the end of the sixth
century bc which was a long time ago and herakleitos observed
that you can never step into the same river twice this made a lot of
sense to me because it seemed to confirm a conclusion id come to long
ago that experience prepares you for what will never happen again
but how does this square with kratylos' subsequent wisecrack you
cant step into the same river once its always good to have a smart
student wholl push you further
which is what the kratylos crack seems to do the river changes
so fast that by the time you step into it its already a different river
but when you think about it the kratylos pushes the herakleitos further
than that in fact it pushes it over a cliff because it implies that you
cant experience anything once because to experience it once you have
to experience it twice which kicks the question from an argument
about repetition into an argument about experience
consider an infant trying to engage with the alien things out there
in the world around it it sees something out there it might turn
out to be its toe but at this point in time the infant doesnt know that
its toe is its toe eventually it discovers a relation it feels it when
it moves it sees a hand its hand reaching toward it feeling its
hand reaching and then touching and its toe feeling something
touching it but all this cant happen the first time around
a child isnt born with a map of its body and it doesnt know its
hand is its hand until it sees it several times and connects its movements
with the feeling of its movement and seeing it move it takes a few
shots the child reaches may fail to reach reaches out randomly
grabs and then it feels something else and it has to process this and
recognize it the next time as the same thing it saw before but its
not exactly the same thing because its the other foot now the child
may not know its the other foot it may not yet know it has two feet
because its early in its career
later the child will be a philosopher and will know perfectly well
or maybe because its a philosopher the child will not be certain that its
the other foot the point is that kratylos positions the argument in
such a way as to start the debate on whether we can see anything once
at all and whether repetition however impossible to imagine may
be necessary for any apprehension of reality at all
the problem doesnt go away nobody seems to know how to deal
with it what we do know what we come to know now about the
brain which is not the mind
nonetheless the brain and the mind have
a sufficiently close relationship such that if you cut somebodys head
off he cant think
beyond that the connections though illuminating are somewhat
more uncertain the mind is not the brain and the brain is not the
mind but the brain seems to support all the activities of the mind we
recognize as taking place and one of the things weve come to
recognize is that the inputs of the sensory system are very
strangely dissociated that is to say if i notice your green shirt
if i notice that you have a green shirt on and youre leaning on your
elbow the visual information about your color and shape and
location in space are registered separately by differentially sensitive
parts of the retina and transmitted to different parts of the brain
the signals for color and shape are not initially processed in the same
place and motion is not processed in the same place as either of
these two so in effect everything that we see is disassembled in our
sensing before its reassembled in our seeing we no longer have the
same model of seeing that we used to have the eye is nothing like a
camera
or its only a little like a camera in that it has a lens that focuses
the light rays reflected from the objects of the world and transmits
them to the retina but thats it because these visual impulses are
registered selectively by differentially sensitized cells in the retina and
transmitted in a series of discrete impulses to different parts of the
brain which has to have some organizing system to reassemble them
for the mind to allow me to recognize that the green belongs to
your shirt and the angled shape is the elbow that belongs to you sitting
there in the second row we dont know how thats done when i say
we i mean nobody knows how its done
nobody knows how the organizing system works some cognitive
psychologists and neurologists can point to certain places in the brain
where this might be done and are careful to say might be done
because various conditionals and subjunctives are necessary to honestly
express the doubtfulness of what we know which coming from an
early background in science always seemed easier to me than it has
apparently been seeing that the career of science however
brilliantly successful its projects appears at the same time to be a
history of error since any theory proposed by any scientist will
eventually be disproved
now one might say that there is a cumulatively positive
achievement in each disproof that each time you disprove something
you improve the state of our knowledge so that gradually we know
more and more and are ignorant of less and less
well maybe and maybe not but generally no particular scientific
judgment has the kind of fixed validity you can come to rest on as
we just found out about the popular hormone replacement therapy
that was known to protect women from the hot flashes sweats and the
vaginal drying of menopause to counter osteoporosis and in the
imagination of its most enthusiastic advocates to reduce the risk of
heart attacks and to act against almost all the effects of aging including
alzheimers disease
but now along comes a double blind study of nearly twenty
thousand menopausal women conducted over the course of a year
and it shows a 3/10 % increase in the combined incidence of breast
cancer heart attacks strokes and blood clots in the group receiving the
combination of estrogen and progesterone over the control group
but what does that tell you the drug combination still works
against the distress of menopause and its action against calcium loss
remains unchallenged no other benefits were documented and there
was a very slight increase in quite severe problems but does a 3/10%
increase in the incidence of problems translate into a 3/10 % increase in
risk for any woman taking the medication and if so is it a bearable
risk and then what generates the risk the drug combination? no
increase in risk was seen in a group of postmenopausal women taking
estrogen alone
was it the manner of administration or the
preparational form of the medication natural or synthetic
progesterone the questions go on
this is also the way of science the more we learn the less we
know and what we know about the brain is even more uncertain
because the organizing mechanism that puts green angle elbow
person back together again into the person in the green shirt leaning
on his elbow in the second row is completely unknown and we
certainly dont know how we can turn away and remember him and
his green shirt when were no longer seeing him because we dont
know about memory we dont know how memories are stored if
theyre stored and in the course of the discussion i was having with
myself i was thinking about the question of memory i was thinking
how we often speak of the value of experience and its experience that
interested me because i wasnt sure i knew what it was
when we speak about experience we imagine that memory has a
positive value but the term memory overstates the case people
when they speak of memory imagine it vaguely as a kind of neural
storage bin maybe like a filing cabinet the way they think of a
computer storage system where each memory has an assigned place
in a distinct folder in a particular drawer of this imaginary filing cabinet
the trouble is nobodys ever been able to find these bins though when
i was in college there was a great physiological psychologist named
donald hebb who proposed that memory which had long been an
embarrassment to all investigators could be located in what he called
reverberatory circuits that is electrical impulses corresponding to
perceptions could be shunted into a self enclosed circle of neurons
around which they would circulate till they could be recalled to be
acted upon by the motor system or integrated into some higher level
cortical activity it was a nice idea and it created a fair amount of
excitement at the time but nobody could find any of these circuits
that lasted longer than a few seconds and since that time back in the
1950s in spite of all the great technological advances in the study of
neurology and psychology nobody really has had anything like a
concrete idea of the neurological basis of memory so were thrown
back as we often are on the phenomenological and the linguistic we
have to examine experience from within experience to find out what
kind of sense we can make of it
now one thing we always seem to mean when we use the word
"experience" is direct sensory apprehension direct contact with
something rather than reading about it or hearing about it thats
the primitive way we talk about it we say hes an experienced driver
which means that when you put him in a car hes done more than read
the manual because if you take someone give him a list of driving
instructions and send him out on the road god help you if youre
anywhere near him learning to drive is a complex activity which
everyone in los angeles knows about los angeles has generated a
demonstrable evolutionary development the automated centaur
nearly everyone in los angeles is attached to a car for the better part of
their lives to get from anywhere to anywhere in los angeles you need
a car because if you try to walk they might arrest you
it nearly happened to us many years ago it was around 1968
and elly and i were staying with a friend in beverly hills and we
were old new yorkers so we decided to take a walk we had a one
year old child in a stroller and we ambled slowly walking and talking
to each other so we didnt notice that the streets were completely
empty of people nor did we notice that a squad car was slowly
trailing us as we walked until it pulled up alongside of us and the
cop on the curbside asked
"where are you going"
"were not going anywhere were walking"
"where are you staying"
apparently it was such a shock to see somebody walking in beverly
hills that they were prepared to interrogate us but after a couple of
questions they were satisfied that there really was a baby in the baby
carriage not a submachine gun and that we were simply taking the air
so they let us go but they said you have to be careful
"be careful?" i said" of what?" they said "well be careful
people dont usually walk here" and i guess they were warning us
that if we crossed the street we might be killed by the oncoming
traffic because the lights are organized largely for the convenience
of the people in vehicles not people who need to cross the street
which we noticed again this afternoon as we waited endlessly for a
green light to cross the broad avenue in front of this building and
then had to wait for the little white manikin to appear in the green
light which signals that you can cross though cars may still be
turning in from the cross street while youre trying to scurry across
before the little white man in the light disappears and this was also
an experience that remains somehow as part of a body of experience
in a memory you can draw on almost like a bank account because
here experience refers to the memory of events and you have to be
able to draw on the memory of past events to be able to do almost
anything requiring a skill or a strategy to drive to make love to do
anything at all to swim any activity you undertake you have to
be able to draw on a repertory of previous engagements with similar
situations you have to recall having been in the water
if youre an adult and youve never swum and somebody tells
you how to swim and then you go into the water youll be surprised
the water will be colder than you thought and youll start to sink and
youll think that it wont hold you up and you will sink if you dont
relax and let the water do its job but its hard to relax and believe
that youll float if its your first time in the water no matter what
they told you in physics
im trying to imagine this because its a long time since i didnt
know how to swim i must have been about ten years old when i first
learned to swim and i remember lying down in the water and being
filled with anxiety
so what i did to allay my anxiety was to find a couple of old
gasoline cans the kind you could fill with a gallon of gasoline when
your car ran out because i figured a can filled with a gallon of air
would be lighter than a gallon of water and would float and help hold
me up i took the two cans and went into the surf and the two cans
actually did keep me up and i felt so confident floating comfortably
on the waves with my two gasoline cans that i began to relax i got so
confident that i let go of one of the cans and i still floated and i was
so confident and relaxed i let go of the other can and i was still floating
but i found this out in the water if anybody had told me this i dont
think i really would have believed it not in a concrete physical way
water is somewhat different when youre in it than when you think
about it
there is in fact nothing in the physical world that behaves precisely
as its described because descriptions are linguistic or diagrammatic
simplifications and dont represent all the concrete events you experience
when you actually do something
now of all the philosophers i know the only one who tried to
make a case for the meaning of experience is john dewey dewey
actually tried to think it through although his most thorough
thinking through took place in a very special situation in an attempt
to describe the experience of art which was not an activity he was
very knowledgeable about but he was knowledgeable about human
activity and he proposed that art making was very much like any
other form of human activity and that at its center is the experience
it provides you with in order to describe this he had to work out his
idea of what an experience was and this turned out to be a profound
idea a very beautiful notion that an experience a real or integral
experience has a narrative form it has a beginning a middle and an
end he supposes that all experiences are generated by a kind of need
or desire as he sees it if you dont need or desire something you wont
experience it fully at all and he distinguishes between what he calls
full or integral experiences and partial or chaotic experiences that
dont involve full self awareness and these dont count at all for dewey
he says look suppose you go to a french restaurant thats
supposed to be a wonderful restaurant and youre all set to have a great
culinary experience youre waiting for the first dish to arrive youve
selected an hors d'oeuvre and youre waiting for it to come you
could be terribly surprised because in spite of the candlelight and the
sparkling tablecloths the paintings on the wall the waiters all speaking
their earthy dialects the frogs legs just dont taste very good they
taste like tough chicken thighs and theres nothing more banal than
overcooked chicken thighs so this is a bad moment a small personal
tragedy but you still have hopes for the entrée you boldly order
boeuf bourguignon but it comes back sour and unpalatable the
wine is past its prime and the beef is stringy this is very disappointing
but youre still trying to find some of the satisfaction you imagined
or hoped for so now youre at dessert
you order an apple and some brie what can they do to an apple
and they didnt make the brie your luck turns around its a
marvelous apple firm and sweet with the fragrance of its blossom
and a luscious creamy brie its a partial retrieval youve snatched a
small satisfaction from the debacle of the meal this is an experience
you will never forget its hopes and its fears its great defeats and
its final small victory next time you go to a french restaurant youll be
wary of the frogs legs and maybe youll avoid the boeuf bourguignon
this is of course a kind of esthetic experience but dewey isnt
satisfied with this he sees all real experiences as esthetic but hes
particularly interested in active experiences in most cases hes talking
about somebody trying to do something and pushing his argument
further he offers a wittgenstein-like example
imagine a stone he says on top of a hill it gets dislodged
somehow and starts to roll down the hill but let us imagine one
more thing that the stone takes an interest in its fate has a desire
to come to a safe resting place somewhere at the bottom of the hill
that it wants to come there and will judge every obstacle along the way
as something to be overcome this stone dislodged somehow in los
angeles by a slight earth tremor that shakes it lightly it starts to
roll slowly down the hill
it approaches the first larger crag and tries to shy away from it
but slams off it skinning its shins so to speak and from there
slides into a little gully that accelerates its descent then every
boulder and every fold in the landscape becomes part of its experience
till it finally comes to a secure haven at the bottom of a little ravine
where its safe until the next rains come and wash it out into the sea
now of course this is a fantasy but according to dewey this is
what all experiences are structured like and this is a very appealing
model but im not sure that it makes adequate sense im not sure it
works this way because it suggests that every experience comes fully
narrativized that as something is happening our consciousness fits
it into a narrative form saying now im at the beginning this is the
turning point and this is the end this is certainly possible but not
necessarily so
maybe its only after every things over and the experience is no
longer present when were trying to recall it that we fit it into this
narrative form which is sometimes hard to do or hard to do when
we first start to recall it when we may only recall a fragment of the
experience or a single image but even then is there a place where
i store stories like a comic book rack and how do i get a story out of
my memory when i recall an experience does the story come out
whole i mean is the story stored somewhere complete from beginning
to end like a film script think about how you call up the memory of
an experience
try to retrieve a memory and try to think about it you know
all stories have something in common though theyre not necessarily
the same
so once again we come to the notion of repetition but in
recalling you dont start at the beginning you may start at an image
in the middle
you come to a bridge so lets imagine coming to a bridge
my friend jean pierre gorin a french filmmaker an american
filmmaker who used to be a french filmmaker he was the young
partner of the somewhat older jean luc godard back at the end of the
sixties hes been teaching at the university of california san diego and
is a longtime colleague of mine he was in the bay area seeing about
a feature film he had written a script for and was seeing someone in
berkeley this was the seventeenth of october 1989 and it was the
day before i was supposed to be doing a reading at fort mason in the
marina district of san francisco
id been teaching i remember how id been teaching and driving
home i figured id watch the third game of the world series and when
i got home i turned on the tv and im listening to al michaels and this
other guy in the broadcast booth chatting for a moment when the
booth suddenly shakes
al michaels says "i think this an earth . . ." and the screen goes
black and its a while before the tv comes back on because this was
the loma prieta earthquake
now jean pierre was in berkeley planning to drive over to san
francisco to visit a film friend and talk with him about one of the
festivals so hes in his car and hes driving to the bay bridge its
october 17 and hes driving to the bay bridge and hes a few blocks away
and he says to himself "you know i should visit alice" alice is his ex-
wife thats alice waters of the famous nouvelle restaurant they
were married for a short while but they remained friends after they
divorced and he helped supply her with fresh vegetables from an
organic farm called chinos in san diego and now he was right up close
to the bay bridge when he decided "im going to go visit alice" so he
turns the car away and as he turns the earth starts to shake later
he found out that the bridge collapsed moments after he turned away
it was a very substantial collapse in which a couple of cars fell in and a
bus filled with buddhists very nearly went down or at least according
to the story i was told
this group of buddhists was on a bus coming from the other side
of the bridge i suppose on the way to some monastic retreat in
berkeley and the bus was very silent as the driver drew up close to
the bay bridge and then just as he was about to get onto the bridge
he hears this strange abrasive sound coming from the back of the bus
and figures something happened to the transmission so he pulls to a
stop and cuts off the engine but the sound continues he turns
around and its the buddhists chanting and he turns back just in time
to see the bridge and the car in front of him go down
now we may suppose this sequence of events must have been
deeply experienced and deeply and somewhat differently encoded in
the memory of the buddhists and the driver for the chanting
buddhists this might have seemed a plausibly reasonable miracle
plausible and reasonable because from their point of view their
chanting was efficacious for the bus driver the chanting was even
more efficacious but in a different way because had he known
they were chanting he would have ignored it and killed them all it
was important for him not to have been a buddhist and not to have
been familiar with their chanting practice whereas if the bus driver
was a chanting buddhist just imagine the bus driver as a chanting
buddhist hes chanting theyre chanting theyre all chanting and they
all go down together
now this is an odd memory to unpack its my unpacking the
memory of a story somebody told me is this an experience if its an
experience its an experience of somebodys telling and im not at all
sure that this retelling my retelling is anything like an exact copy of
that other persons telling but whether thats true or not how does it
unpack when i tell it it unrolls as if i had a complete script ahead of
time and im not aware of any script before me i seem to sense it
as i come forward how does a narrative roll out of your mouth
how does it unroll in your mind because it unrolls in your mind
pretty much the same way it unrolls in your mouth like im coming
to a bridge at some point in every narrative you come to a bridge
whatever kind of bridge it is it has to be crossed something will
happen at that place and somehow the trigger for me is coming to a
bridge something i might not have thought of but the bridge
made me think of it
it was back in the summer of 52 when eisenhower was being
nominated for the presidency i was working for the forestry
department as a smoke jumper out in idaho and i was hitching back
home itd been a fine job working in the intoxicating pine forest of
northern idaho just about two miles from the canadian border and
you made money but i sent most of it back home because there was
nothing to spend it on up there youd work all week and then the guys
would pile into cars and rush off to coeur d'alene to play cards and get
laid by the whores that hung out at the local bar i liked the bar but
i wasnt turned on by the whores so id go along for a few beers and
play some cards and i didnt spend much money because i wasnt
losing it at cards and i wasnt spending it on the girls so i had plenty
of money but i got rid of it sending most of it home keeping what
i considered a reasonable amount for the hitch home so i was hitching
my leisurely way back because it was a warm and beautiful summer
but by the time i got to eastern pennsylvania id almost entirely
run out of money and i was getting what i hoped would be my last ride
which for some reason or other was pretty hard to get till a guy
came along in a beaten up old plymouth it was a real wreck that had
almost no brakes and the only way he had to slow down was to gently
ease on the emergency brake and i would open the door and drag my
foot along the road to help bring the car to a stop the driver didnt
have any money either and somewhere in pennsylvania i gave him my
last couple of bucks for a little bit of gas which took us into new
jersey where we were starting to run very low he was nursing the
gas coasting down hills and trying to economize as much as possible
and as were getting nearer to the george washington bridge i realized i
didnt have enough change for the bridge toll which i remember was
something like a buck and all i have left is fifty cents which as an
old new yorker i knew was just enough for the tunnel but the
holland tunnel is a couple of miles further south we could get fifty
cents worth of gas that would get us there but we couldnt pay the
toll to get through we discuss all this while were coasting down hills
and im dragging my foot to slow down at the bottom and we decide
to go for the tunnel and hope that our gas holds out long enough to
get us there and were watching the gas gauge which i know works
on a float valve and is never very accurate and were nursing the car
along knowing it can go dead at any minute and we make it to the
tunnel were finally into the tunnel hoping to get through and
were talking to the car encouraging it come on little car dont go dead
on us now come on little car be a good little car if the car had a
name wed be patting it on the dashboard and whispering in its ear
come on sybaris come on sybaris dont give out on us now so were
nursing it along and we come out into the light of new york we get
to tenth avenue and were out of gas
but the little italian guy the driver hes streetwise he says i
tell you what we do we push her over to some car thats got lots of
gas you lay chickee and tell me if theres any cops coming and ill
siphon some gas out for us we get out of the car we push the old
wreck over toward a shiny new oldsmobile my friend takes a length
of rubber tubing out of the trunk of the plymouth hes apparently
done this before he unscrews the other cars gas cap inserts the pipe
sucks the air out and siphons some gas until he figures hes got enough
and then he offers to drive me home but i wave him off because im
kind of glad to see him go and then i realize i dont have the carfare
to get to newkirk avenue because id spent my last money on the tunnel
toll so then i do what lots of new yorkers do i go down into the
subway wait till i hear the train coming leap the turnstile and rush
madly down to the platform and into the train headed for brooklyn
now these stories unrolled smoothly enough from beginning to
end but they all started before the beginning they began at a bridge
and seemed to coalesce around it though i was never aware of that
i was only aware of calling back an experience that came back in the
telling but i dont know how i remember stories though now it
seems like they coalesce around an image maybe it labels them and
they get stored under that label so i call "bridge!" and they come
out like an obedient dog though i very much doubt it but i think i
often recall whole passages of experience from an image a single
salient image and they emerge as stories though not always and
i dont really know how other people remember experiences and whether
they even recall them as stories
the sciences have not been very helpful in the study of memory
when psychologists and neurologists have studied memory theyve
mostly concentrated on simple objects like word lists they might
present you with a handful of words like "solipsism" "civilization"
"orgasm" "cat" and then test to see how many you remember
and you may say them over and over again in your mind and remember
most or even all of them but thats not terribly useful information
because it doesnt tell us much about the way we usually remember
and it tells us nothing about how we remember experiences or stories
though we might combine the words into a sentence like "civilization
permits sufficient solipsism to ignore the cats orgasm" but then weve
turned the word list into part of a story which we might compress
into an image of bishop berkeley serenely contemplating the
moonlight falling on the liffey while two cats are fucking on the river
bank beside him that would probably give us a better memory of the
word list and do it in a more characteristically human way
i think we remember things much better when we narrativize
them which leads me to believe that memory has an organizational
structure much like narrative narrativization or the logic its based
on may be central to memory and narrative experience may itself be
based on the registration of repeated sensorimotor sequences in
volitional action having a form like noticing something starting to
reach for it almost reaching it and finally reaching it or failing to
reach it
but all this is pure speculation and in any case doesnt address the
question of why the same story of the same experience told at
different times can turn out different
i was telling the story of how we got across the hudson how we
came to the bridge and turned away and drove to the tunnel and i
remember the little guy who was driving but i had a friend who was
traveling with me on the whole trip home and i dont remember what
happened to him i cant remember what happened to walter walter
and i had come back together we hitched across the whole country
together i remember him sitting next to me in the cab of a truck
outside bismark but i dont remember him in the car i dont
remember him in that brakeless wreck of a plymouth i dont know if
he was sitting in the back dragging his foot on the other side of the car
out the back door i dont remember him standing by while we were
siphoning the gas walter has disappeared and now i remember
that he disappeared but i still cant fit him into the experience i didnt
remember him when i was telling the story and now i remember it as
a fact that he was there or i think it was a fact
but somehow the organizational structure left walter out theres
no reason why i should have wanted to leave him out but somehow
it didnt dramatize for me that way there must have been something
about the way the story meant something to me the way my
experience unfolded but this is an experience thats not an accurate
representation of what happened its an adequate representation of
the way i felt it happened
but something is wrong i dont know where to put walter
walters a perfectly fine fellow and i like him theres no reason why
i should want to leave him out but i dont know where he sat in the
story maybe he left somewhere earlier and went home on a bus
but i dont remember that either and somehow hes gone
now this failure suggests something of the reconstructive power
of this kind of memory maybe theres some kind of matrix for the
kind of stories we tell and for the experiences we remember that
may take shape as we experience events again and again and tell stories
about them again and again and the shape our experiences may take
may come from the habits of our telling as the habits of our telling
may take shape from the habits of our seeing and apprehending and
in my case i think they may take shape from a play of contrasts
between certain tonalities
like between the hapless car and the distance we had to traverse
and the funny little guy in his beaten up car who was the only one
willing to give us a hitch while we were being passed by all these other
comfortable people in their expensive big cars on the pennsylvania
turnpike a little italian guy from red hook or bay ridge driving his
brakeless gasless car who probably picked us up for some gas money
and was making a mistake because we didnt have much but he was
almost lovable in his marvelous italian neighborhood smalltime crook
amiability there must have been something that appealed to me in
the contrast between his good nature and his bad character his
competent incompetence and its contrast with the conventional
reality were always presented with
as at the very beginning of the trip back home i remember driving
with one guy who gave us a hitch close to spokane this guy was
driving what in those days was a very fast car a brand new hudson
hornet we get in the car and were cruising along this wide open four
lane highway and it doesnt take long before i notice were sailing past
every car on the road i lean over casually to see the speedometer and
i see were doing 110 miles an hour it doesnt feel like 110 miles an
hour the car is new the road is new and the drive is smooth as silk
still im getting nervous because anything that happens at 110 miles
an hour is going to happen very fast
but the driver is imperturbable hes a freckle faced sandy haired
guy in a plaid summer jacket and an expensive white on white shirt
open at the throat looking like some kind of successful salesman who
turns to me and says why dont you boys keep an eye out for the police
i always get a little concerned when i light a cigarette then he proceeds
to reach into his breast pocket for the pack flips out a cigarette
places it in his mouth puts back the pack and reaches for the lighter
thats when i notice the guy has no arms he has two prosthetic steel
clutching devices hes starting to light the cigarette with one steel
hand on the wheel the other holding the lighter hes driving 110 miles
an hour and handling the car with the confidence of a racing car driver
sure i said well keep an eye out for the cops but you know we really
need to make a phone call and wed appreciate it if youd let us off at the
next exit and i turn around to look at walter his handsome pale face
paler than ever his eyebrows raised in amazement as he looks from
the wheel to the cigarette to the speedometer and back to me shaking his
head and this time walter is with me
David Antin
i never knew what time it was
University of California Press
Copyright © 2005 by the Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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