A block away from my apartment on 26th Avenue South and South
Jackson Street stands a brand-new cluster of townhouses. This time last
year, a small house stood in this place. It was white, fenceless, and
gloomy. Its front yard was a mess of wild grass and dead leaves. A deaf
satellite dish stood on the right side of its rotting roof. People
lived in this sad place, but they never left or entered it. The only
noise that came from the home was the bark of a dog that never
encountered the world beyond the black bars on the windows. This dog,
its unknown owners, and the house are now a memory (a miserable memory)
that I’m devoted to for no reason save to keep myself on top of the
shock-fast changes that frequently rupture the illusion of continuity
and permanence. Each time I recall the memory, however, it keeps
changing, particularly the satellite dish—it was once on the
right side of the roof and now it is on the left.
This situation reminds me of the first
paragraph of Borges’s
“The Aleph”:
“On the incandescent February morning Beatriz Viterbo died… I
noticed that the iron billboards around Constitution Plaza were
advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact
pained me, for I realized that the vast and incessant universe was
already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the
first of an endless series. The universe would change but I would not,
I thought with a certain sad vanity.”
A loved one has died but the world around her passing refuses to
cease. Against the city’s incessant changes, the narrator of the story
promises not to change and to devote his life to the memory of the dead
woman. The memory is all he can grasp in the flood of changes that
submerge and convey her
death (with its fixed time and place) to
the ocean of oblivion.
But a memory presents the devotee with a terrible problem. Because
the world changes, because the force of life only knows (goes in) one
direction—forward—because the present quickly slides into
the past, and the past finally sinks into nothingness, the memory
cannot be refreshed by the now, the reality, the city, the billboards.
It becomes a phantom in his head. A phantom that grows fainter by the
day and, worst of all, changes every time he recalls it. A memory can’t
be trusted.
“Proust realized that the moment we finish eating [a] cookie,”
writes Jonah Lehrer in his new and a bit too enthusiastic book
Proust Was a Neuroscientist, “we begin warping the memory of
the cookie… In In Search of Lost Time, the
inaccuracy and instability of the memory is the moral.” Despite having
this understanding, Proust still spent the last two decades of his life
writing a work that in the end would be the last thing anyone wants
their precious memories to be: inaccurate and unstable. And it is
precisely this understanding—the world inside, like the world
outside, endlessly changes—that makes him so relevant to our time
and city. We keep writing about him, particularly in this newspaper (at
least once a year), because he, like the narrator in “The Aleph,” knew
his project, his devotion, his book was doomed to fail.
Why do we find Proust’s failure meaningful or relevant? Because all
around us, we see a city, a Seattle, that we can’t stop, that offers us
no existential anchor, that makes a fool out of our memories by daily
destroying the old and building the new—yet we continue the
doomed project of living here. The failure of writing In Search of
Lost Time is related to the failure of being in Seattle. The
writing of that book and living in this city are both searches for
memories that stabilize life and defeat death. But whereas the writer
of Search recalls people, the citizen of this city recalls
places: the water reservoir that’s now a park, the old library that’s
been replaced by the new library, the used car lot on Rainier Avenue
South that’s now a complex of senior housing and condominiums.
But sometimes the changes are so quick they completely catch us by
surprise.
Framed by the window of my apartment’s bedroom is a cluster of
townhouses that are under construction. I have no idea of the exact day
or moment that these unfinished townhouses entered the view of my
window; nor do I have an idea of the house or building they’re
replacing. I have no idea why I have no idea of what was there before.
How can you forget something that was next door for years? Every effort
to retrieve the forgotten place, to register the change, to fill in
the loss meets zero success. All I have is what is there now: the
vacant space of the construction site, the echo of banging, and shouts
in Spanish.
Nothing is safe. The gaps in memory multiply. What used be at 12th
Avenue and East Pike Street? What used to be at 23rd Avenue East and
East Madison Street? What used to be at Denny Way and Westlake
Avenue? What was South Lake Union before it
was South Lake
Union? What was once in
my window? 
Jonah Lehrer reads on Tues Nov 13 at Town Hall (1119 Eighth Ave,
652-4255), 7:30 pm, $5.
