Thanks For The Memory

Every evening when I go to my room, I meditate on the events of the day, on the items I have read in the newspaper or in some one of the journals to which I subscribe, conversations I have had with friends or neighbors, and I think of something about which I might create a blog.  But I discovered some months ago that almost without exception everything which I am able to set out in vivid prose in my head in those evening moments of retrospection have vanished completely from my consciousness when I awake in the morning.  It’s not that I only remember vaguely, no, it is that the slate has been wiped clean: there is no memory whatsoever of anything I thought or fantasized the night before.  I know now that if I don’t write down something explicit the memory cannot be reconstructed.  This loss of memory is dramatic because it is not like a film of some sort has settled on my thoughts, no, not at all; they have completely vanished, as though they never were.  I thought of this the other night when we were in a cab with a friend talking over the London musical “Top Hat” from which we had just come, and I was exclaiming over the brilliant first number of the show which all three of us had applauded and whooped over when it ended, and our friend had no memory at all of it, in fact was quite hazy about anything that had occurred in the two hour production.  As  she herself knows and will tell you, she has the early stages of senile dementia.  Am I far behind, I wonder.  Do I always remember people and incidents from the night before?  Yes, I do.  But thoughts, the ideas of the evening, they will not return.  Last night I watched the film version of Margurite Duras” “The Lover” with Tony Leung, as the wealthy Chinese playboy living in Vietnam who becomes besotted with a teenaged French girl played by Jane March.  The action of the film is essentially the story of their chance meeting, instant attraction, and his deflowering of her that evening, followed by scenes of their intense passionate encounters until circumstances force them apart.  The sexual splendor of these two actors, their uninhibited surrender of their beautiful bodies to the camera and photographer, is constantly elegant, projecting passion born of a psychological desire for closeness.  Nothing about this sexual sensual film has the slightest trace of pornography.  It is interesting, because while I cannot remember my thoughts, I could narrate and describe the visuals of this film almost scene for scene.  One would think that for someone who made his living from writing and speaking for over forty years, words rather than images would be paramount  Yet I must struggle to read the articles in the many journals to which I subscribe, sometimes having to re-read passages which I don’t get on the first take, and again so many of them are forgotten so easily that I will often pick up from the table a discarded, London Review of Books, let’s say, and be intent on my reading when suddenly it occurs to me that I have read the article a day or two earlier.