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[la---ra]

4. Dream-memories

Thursday April 20 2023

***

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

Shirley Jackson 

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”

Eugene Ionesco

"Waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed and even of the truth residing in that horror."

Bernhard Schlink

***

Recently I have been forgetting if something happened to me in real life or if it was a dream. 

I have been mistaking reality with the things that happen inside my head when I am sleeping. 

I see my dead grandpa moving around his house in Sed el Baouchrieh, I find myself lost in Beirut’s streets and alleyways, I watch an old movie with my parents and tell my friend about it on the phone, I go to a political discussion about the state of the country, I talk to old friends from high school that I haven’t seen in years, I get into passionate arguments and profound discussions. I relive days that I have previously lived, except everything is different. My throat closes up, my eyes tear up when I inhale tear gas or black smoke. Earthquakes, explosions, floods, war. I see the street where I grew up, radiant, covered with blue sky and sunshine. Mafias, militias, sinister smiles and threats surround me. 

All of these things really happened, but didn’t. They exist, but they don’t. 

I am trapped inside memories of the past. I struggle to release myself from the burden of remembering. But I can’t escape it, not even when I am sleeping, not even in my dreams.

***

Perhaps it is obvious that memories are similar to dreams: they are, after all, made of the same material. Memories, like dreams, come to us in images more so than words. Or at least, that is how it is for me.

It must have been that way for Walter Benjamin, too, because he came up with a term to describe this process: "thought-images." In his book Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Benjamin writes a series of what he calls “thought images” or “thought figures” — memories of his childhood in the city from which he was exiled. Thought images are pieces of writing in which image and thought cannot be separated. They speak to the imagistic nature of memory: memories come in images, sounds, feeling.

***

About a year after the August 4 explosion, my sister told me that she had a strange dream: she was in our summer house in the mountains and intruders were trying to get in. “I was alone,” she said. “Only Meera was with me. And I could hear them coming in. Then I called Dad, and he told me that he is coming. And then he comes and sits on the sofa in the living room while the intruders are coming in, walking by us.” 

I said: “It sounds like your August 4 experience.”

On August 4, Lea was at our house in Beirut alone with Meera, her best friend, while I was at our summer house that she dreamt about. After the explosion, she called our father, who came to the house. I said this to Lea, recalling all the elements that were present in her dream. Our father's behavior in her dream reminded me of something she said when she was telling me what happened to them on that day. After our Dad came home and comforted Lea, he said he wanted to go back to the office at AUB to pick up some things and check the damage. When they were on their way back home from the university, Dad said: “I want to get a manouche, do you want one?” When Lea had recounted this to me, she was laughing at how nonchalant Dad was. 

Lea was convinced but amused: “I didn’t even think of that. I don’t think about August 4.”

“It lives in your subconscious,” I told her.

Later that night, Lea told me that she remembered something about her dream that confirmed my theory. In her dream, her friend Fawaz was at the house but left before the intruders tried to break in. And the same thing happened on August 4: her male friend was over at our house and had left right before the explosion happened. 

How do we remember things in our dreams? Where are our memories present, how do they reveal themselves?

***

One day, I will write a series of my own dream-memories.

But for now, I will write about just one.

Last summer, I went on a hike with my family in a pine forest. It was hot. The heat seemed to rise up from the dry earth and the towering pine trees above us. The sky was clear and the sun was strong. My aunt and uncle stopped halfway through the hike and went back to the restaurant. They waited there as the rest of us got lost in the pine forest. 

The entire time I was there under the burning sun, I was mulling over a dream that I had had the night before – except it seemed not like a dream to me. I would remember or think of it in flashes, it was like the dream came over and took control of me and my facilities. What I'm trying to say is that I did not control the images of the dream or its recollection.

In the dream I received an explanation from someone who had hurt me deeply, one that made me calm down and feel at ease. It clarified things for me. In the dream, I thought, oh that makes sense – and oh, what a relief! So it isn’t all in my head, I thought to my dream-self. 

But it is all in my head. When I woke up, I did not realize that it was a dream, and remembered that dream as though it was a memory. Sometimes dreams and memories have the same hazy and blurring feeling and quality, so that they are almost the same. But this was not a memory, it was a dream. 

***

Sometimes I wish my dreams were real and that I could disappear into them. I catch a fleeting feeling that my dream was real, that it actually happened. Then I realize that it was not real, that it was just a dream. But I wish that it was real and that I could go back and be inside the dream. 

I feel the same way about my memories.

Did things really happen that way?

Nothing feels real when I am remembering it and I am constantly full of doubt. Did it really happen that way?

What I would give to go back.

***

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

Ursula K Le Guin

[la---ra]

3. Writing to remember

Thursday April 13 2023

I write, like Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor and countless others, to know what I think. I also write to remember. When I really think about it, my fear of forgetting is what drove my initial inclination to keep a journal as a child.

When I was around 12 I looked back on my life and I realized that I did not remember anything. I felt frustrated with my consciousness which felt slippy, hazy, and blurry, as if I had spent my life half-asleep. From then on I resolved to remember everything, to keep my eyes wide open during the day, not to let anything slip from my mind. 

Ever since then I have been terrified of the idea of forgetting. For a while I would write everything down, everything that happened to me, obsessively, like Mirek in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I wanted to remember everything.

I continue to write things down today: conversations, things people say, things I think, things I read. But still I find that my mind is a haze, and especially in the past few years. A thought that I had two minutes ago suddenly slips from my brain and I find myself unable to retrieve it. 

My obsession with writing things down is really an obsession with memory and a fear of forgetting and of oblivion.

[la---ra]

#2. Arrogance

Thursday April 12 2023

All my life I have tried to avoid it, and yet I am overwhelmed by it. I have always known that arrogance is one of my biggest flaws. Perhaps this blog is the utmost proof of it.

The people in my life have frequently pointed to my insecurity as a sign that I am [too] humble, that I should "be more confident." In actuality insecurity is only indicative of arrogance. When I feel most insecure is when I am most arrogant and self-involved: those are the moments when I am certain with every fiber of my being that I am important and interesting enough for people to be staring at me, judging me, laughing at me, thinking of me.

Once those moments have passed and I have gathered myself, I know that of course no one was looking at me, no one was thinking of me, and most people care very little what I do or say. But somehow I find myself lost, time and time again, in the delusions of arrogance. I am filled with the anxious and utmost certainty that my humiliating existence warrants deep and precise attention and judgment from others.

No matter what I hope to say or try to write, there is always someone who has done it better than I could ever aspire to. Here's Elena Ferrante in an interview:

"Writing is an act of pride. I’ve always known that, and so for a long time I hid the fact that I was writing, especially from the people I loved. I was afraid of exposing myself and of others’ disapproval. Jane Austen organized herself so that she could immediately hide her pages if someone came into the room where she had taken refuge. It’s a reaction I’m familiar with: you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know. Is it a task? A mission? A vocation? Who called on me, who assigned me that task and that mission? A god? A people? A social class? A party? The culture industry? The lowly, the disinherited, the lost causes? The entire human race? The elusive subject that is women? My mother, my female friends? No—by now it’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself. I assigned myself, for motives that are obscure even to me, the job of describing what I know of my era, that is—in its simplest form—what happened under my nose, that is to say the life, the dreams, the fantasies, the languages of a narrow group of people and events, within a restricted space, in an unimportant language made even less important by the use I make of it."

I frequently think of the verse in Ecclesiastes: "Of making many books there will be no end." It's true. There is always the pressure to be original and novel especially with forms of expression like writing. I have felt that pressure my whole life, but I also initially turned to writing as a way to release the thoughts in my head and to order and understand them. I try to remember that writing for me is not and should not be about striving for originality, novelty, or even creativity. There is nothing new under the sun. I write so that I can understand and think more clearly. Joan Didion said: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Flannery O'Connor said: "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."

[la---ra]

#1. Starting a blog

Thursday April 6 2023

I am going to start a blog. This will be a writing project. At least every week, once a week, one hour will be spent writing on a particular theme. I am starting on a Thursday night and hopefully will continue writing weekly every Thursday.

I have kept a journal since I learned how to write. My desk at home has a deep drawer where I store all the small notebooks, diaries, Moleskines, and composition books that I've filled over the years. Journal writing has never been regular for me; it is the complete opposite of that. Sometimes I go months without holding a pen and writing. I used to be more strict about it as a teenager.

The point is that I have always been drawn to writing. This blog is a space for me to explore that in a way that is hopefully more disciplined than keeping a journal has been, and less public and pretentious than writing in captions on Instagram.

Almost everything I have written publicly has been a source of embarrassment for me: I think I have written something worth sharing, then a few weeks or months pass and when I read it again, I only feel disdainful. So I am worried about this project. I'm not sure how to trust the words that I write when I have always ended up feeling disgusted by them.

I have wanted to take up blog-writing for years. Every couple of years, I start a new blog on a WordPress site, and every time I abandon it. Yesterday, something came over me and I suddenly started making a list of blog prompt ideas, things I wanted to write about. This gave me more confidence to start this project, which is really just an attempt to practice writing; to practice a form of expression that will not have anything to do with studying, with theory, with grading or with grades. As long as I have one theme upon which I can concentrate and write about for one hour weekly, I will continue.

I live in a very quiet area, jarringly different from the noisy city in which I grew up. I miss everything about home; most of all I miss the people that I love, their noise and sounds, and the noise of the city. I never thought that I would miss noise. The silence here is almost unbearable. Recently, when I need to cook, I have gotten into the habit of playing "Julie & Julia" in the background. It is a comforting movie, and the background noise, the accompaniment that it offers me is comforting. Maybe any person who has watched this movie as many times as I have in the past couple of months will be convinced that they must start a blog. There is something about a blog that turns writing into a project. I need a project to focus on that is not academic and work-related. I want to explore writing creatively and freely, away from the restrictions of the classroom. So this is what I will do.