Authors: Matthew Stadler,Columbia University. Writing Division
Tags: #Young men
When you were a Tadpole and I was a Fish,
In the Paleozoic time.
And side by side on the ebbing tide,
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen —
My heart was rife with the joy of life.
For I loved you even then.
Mindless we lived, mindless we loved,
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of a Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot sands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death,
And crept into life again.
We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand.
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand,
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet,
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more.
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The aeons came and the aeons fled,
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day,
And the night of death was past.
Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights.
And oh, what beautiful years were these
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filed and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech!
Thus life by life, and love by love,
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath, and death by death,
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke, and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
I was thewed like an Aurocks bull
And tusked like the great Cave-Bear,
And you, my sweet, from head to feet,
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain,
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed,
We mumbled the bones of the slain.
I flaked a fiint to a cutting edge,
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland dank,
And fitted it, head to haft.
Then I hid me close in the reedy tarn.
Where the Mammoth came to drink —
Through brawn and bone I drave the stone,
And slew him upon the brink.
Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came trooping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof,
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl, with many a growl,
We talked the marvel o'er.
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might,
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the Age of Sin did not begin
Till our brutal tusks were gone.
And that was a million years ago,
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here to-night in the mellow light.
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is as dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet —
Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay,
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones.
And deep in the Coralline crags.
Our love is old, and our lives are old.
And death shall come amain.
Should it come to-day, what man may say
We shall not live again?
God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings tofly;
He sowed our spawm in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die;
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-boned men made war,
And the ox-wain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.
Then, as we linger at luncheon here,
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish.
I'd forgotten to introduce Duncan.
"Duncan," I announced, turning toward him. "Duncan Taqdir, my very best friend. This is Mrs. Dunphy," and he took her fishlike hand in his and shook it vigorously.
"I'm pleased," he said to her. "Pleased to meet you." The little poem drifted back into blurred unremembrance.
We stood at the threshold for some long moments, the aroma of curry drifting out across our noses. Mrs. Dunphy stood and stared, clucking thoughtfully and shaking her head in apparent disbelief. I smiled big and dumb.
"We'll both be attending the university this term," I tried.
Mrs. Dunphy snapped back into phase. "Oh, yes, certainly. Do come in, mustn't stand around on ceremony, come right in and have a seat in the kitchen." And we walked in through the cozy vestibule, all warm wood and carpets, and followed Mrs. Dunphy and the heady aroma into the kitchen, up and back of the enormous room we'd seen from the street.
"It's all coming back quite vividly. Maxwell," Mrs. Dunphy called over her shoulder, lifting pan tops to sprinkle spice and stir. "You'd been feeling ill that evening, am I right?"
"Oh, yes, quite ill. Rather dizzy really, and hungry."
"There was that nasty spell at the Fountain of the Ages," Mrs. Dunphy continued, sitting down by us with a little ladle of curry. "You disappeared off into the bushes, I believe. Curry?" And she held the lurid yellow ladle up to our noses.
"No thank you," Duncan answered. "We've just eaten."
Mrs. Dunphy smiled briskly and plopped the dripping treat back in the pan. "Did you meet Mr. Dunphy that evening?" she asked.
"No," I said. "He'd gone home. The Fair had 'tired him out' you told me. In the Court of Mines? The pretty pink gravel?" I tried, prompting her memory. We sat again in silence, remembering.
Mr. Dunphy came knocking along the hallway (I presumed it was he) with his face in a book and an empty mug in hand.
"Dear." Mrs. Dunphy beckoned. "I'd like you to meet two young friends. Maxwell and Duncan." We rose from our chairs, me knocking mine over backward, and extended our two hands to Mr. Dunphy, whose two hands were both busy. He nodded politely and went to the stove.
"It's a pleasure, gentlemen. To what do we owe their visit, dearest? What brings them to our little kingdom?" He peeked into the empty teapot and put some water on to boil. Mrs. Dunphy turned to us, eyebrows upraised in wonder.
"Maxwell and I," Duncan started, "will be attending the university. We've come looking for lodgings, just a room and some sort of arrangement for use of the kitchen." He could be so cordial when he wanted.
"I thought we could let the upstairs to them," Mrs. Dunphy improvised, "up above the sewing room." We maintained our calm dispositions, taking this fiction as the fact Mrs. Dunphy intended it to be, and showed no surprise.
"Fine, fine, fine," her husband answered, putting his book down at last. "You're in charge here, dearest." He looked over at both of us, looking us up and down as if we were diseased trees. "They seem to be healthy young specimens, I'd say." And he snorted in conclusion, turning back to the stove to pour the whistling water, and trundled back from whence he came.
Our room has one wide window looking west through trees and across the water. The low walls slant in about four feet up from the floor and come to a white flat ceiling only eight feet high. The two beds tuck up into their own little window bays, facing out south with nothing but wild green branches to see. Mrs. Dunphy said we could drag a desk up from their basement and if we didn't mind would we keep the endless shelves of books right where they were in our room. There's no fireplace, but well adjust.
Tomorrow is the first day of classes.
17 AUGUST 1915
We stayed our first night at the Dunphys without going back to the city for fear we'd oversleep again. Mrs. Dunphy was being more than generous with linens and towels and that thick curry she let stew all day.
We slept together in one of the thin beds, which was fine and cozy for sleeping but proved comical and impractical for all else we might do in bed. Everything goes loose in sleep. Like that groan and growl I make in my throat if I've just come or am falling fast into sleep. Or the way thoughts which have been buried come drifting by, let loose from below. If I'm not yet sleeping and try to seize hold of the thought, it disappears. But if I let my mind loose, it all comes in again.
We might rearrange the furniture, pushing the two beds together in the wide western bay and making a little sitting area where the beds were.
18 AUGUST 1915
Professor Brown asked why can't you voice someone else's memories and I remembered what Father'd said about songs sung in our bones and spoke up. I thought, I said, it might be possible. He said try. It was so silent and dusty, with sunlight sliding in through trees, and our little gallery of desks fanned out in front of him. I knew no one there, though we'd all given our names. I felt bold and anonymous.
It was cheating really, because I didn't say whose memory I'd voice and the tale I gave was so general it must be that everyone remembers it from somewhere.
"It was a bright sunny morning," I began. Mr. Brown watched with interest, allowing me to let out enough rope to hang by, I presumed. "I had never slept so well, lying so relaxed and awake, or both asleep and awake, this particular perfect condition being something words can't describe, really. I felt eager and ready for the day ahead.
"I was very young. We were off to visit relatives, ones I feared because their house smelled so odd, all mothballs and camphor and such, and because their manner was so stiff and accusing. I often had nightmares about these particular relatives, especially, I remember, one in which I'm devoured. Today was a birthday and I was to bring a gift. Still the lovely morning had me feeling brave.
"Should I go on?"
"Whose memory is this?" Mr. Brown asked the class, looking to them for the answer. Some few of the thirty-odd students raised their hands.
"Mister," and he paused, looking to his list.
"Maxwell."
"Mr. Maxwell has begun a fable, or, potentially, a myth." Mr. Brown nodded to me appreciatively. I fairly burst with the pleasure of recognition. "A fine example of shared memory. In any group there is a common ground of experience, a history of trials and triumphs through which every individual must go and does go, somehow.
My
intention, however, was to establish quite the opposite point.
"My intention was to establish, by my little question, the isolation of individual memory. How will each of us remember Mr. Maxwell's story? Is there a correct memory of that event? Would the event have any existence without our memories of it? Given the inevitable differences in memory, what is the true nature of that past event? Is it Mr. Maxwell's memory of it? Is it only what We're remembered in common? The fact of Mr. Maxwell telling it, the fact of our being together here in this room? There is no question each individual collects those pieces of experience which somehow suit his needs, that memory is selective and idiosyncratic, and purposeful, though perhaps not consciously so.
"I hope we'll all begin this course with that as a given. Memory is an individual phenomenon, a struggle for persistence guided by the evolutionary forces at work in each man's psyche. What survives in your world may not survive in mine.
"As for Mr. Maxwell's welcome diversion, the myth or fable. Every culture has its fables." Here Mr. Brown paused to sigh, approaching what must've seemed an unwelcome can of worms (given it was just our first day). "Some set of stories that gives form and voice to their common experience. Especially as children we take these stories into our own experience, even enacting them as a set of struggles of our own making, practicing, perhaps, for our inevitable future struggles.
"As adults, however—and perhaps this point will help us synthesize the two views—as adults we manage a distinction between real memory and myth, experience and stories. It is typical—and this point is telling—typical of primitive cultures that they, just like children in our own culture, take the myth as real, regarding that which they've imagined as real experience.
"I can't stress enough the wisdom of that old rubric 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.' Here, as always, it is true. Just as civilizations have advanced from that primitive infancy, in which what is myth and what is actual experience are so blended as to remain indistinct, just as they have advanced to a more mature separation of reality and fable, so we see individuals in our own lives grow from a childhood of wonder, of shared memories and stories enacted, felt as true, see them grow, I say, to an adulthood of wisdom, a clear sense of the separate experience of each individual. Myths may successfully abstract our individual experience, but they cannot be called equivalent.
"How many, I'd ask now, experienced precisely the experience Mr. Maxwell can voice to us? How many believe the actuality of their individual experience was precisely as he says? Certainly we must recognize the value in childhood of such wonderful tales, but also we must face the problematic fact of the individuality of memory, as wise adults."
I had no idea whether I agreed or disagreed, and, more important, whether I'd been praised or criticized. I'd only meant to try and guess what everyone might remember, but Mr. Brown took it far along some other path, pursuing some idea that must've been bugging him lately. It was like getting one of Father's notes, only I didn't have any clear written record of it to look at and contemplate.
I asked Mr. Brown, after, if he could recommend some reading, just to make things clear to me.
"Look, Mr. Maxwell, at the inscription on this building," he suggested cryptically. "That should be plenty for the first day."
It said "Social Sciences," chiseled in the stone. Deep, sharp letters cut in the rock by a metal blade banged hard with a craftsman's hammer. The bright white sunlight dappled through the tall crowd of eucalyptus that lurched and lapped over the stone facade, dancing across the even letters. "Social Sciences." The two words were falling apart in my head. The various pieces were so elusive, devoid of meanings, or rather too full of them. "Really, there's too much to see," Father had said. I felt I needed a map to navigate my way across their mysterious surface.
"Social Sciences." It was the fact of their existence in stone, I guess. Really I found the shapes, carved so neatly, had fixed my attention. How could a blade be made to curve so cleanly round as the one that carved "S"? Why was there no moss growing in these wonderful fissures? The "o," a perfect moat protecting nothing, a vertical moat in a climate where it seldom rained. I thought I'd best keep quiet in class until things became clearer.
19 AUGUST 1915