On Memory and Writing

Leonard Schwartz and Susan Schultz

Al Filreis

Several times recently I've mentioned Susan Schultz' Dementia Blog here, so I won't repeat the basic information about the project; rather I'll direct you back here. Michael Nardone recent completed transcribing the conversation between Leonard Schwartz and Susan recorded for one of Leonard's "Cross Cultural Poetics" shows. We hope to publish it some day in Jacket2 but meantime here's a preview - an unedited transcription of one portion of the interview.

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SCHWARTZ:
So, it's a really rich and complicated weave of things, and so beautifully juxtaposed. You know, you have that section: my empathy is memory, is a container into which your experience sometimes fits, shallow grave or swimming pool, death by water. The mind is a memory of overpasses, not to pass over but under by way of air. The air is human. I am the limbless woman.

Can you say a little bit—-I know this is a, you know, vast and grave question—-but a little bit about your take on memory having moved through this experience with dementia, and on the personal level, your mother's dementia, and the political level, with the Bush administration now reaching its end?

SCHULTZ:
Could you ask me a bigger question, Leonard?

SCHWARTZ:
Were one to ask Proust the question about memory, I know what we would get. It would take several volumes. It's a big question. He's got quite a few books that are devoted to that, but what would be the thumbnail sketch of Susan Schultz's vision of memory?

SCHULTZ:
Well, I've always been quite obsessed with memory, and I think most of my work comes out of the way in which my memory—which I think in many ways is simply an echo chamber of the larger cultural and social memory—works, if that's the right word. So, I think memory is not just a solitary activity, it's very much a communal activity. It's what joins us to other people once we take our memories and offer them to others. So, perhaps one of the most striking effects of memory-loss is that return to a kind of profound solitude that I certainly saw in my mother for a long time. Now that she's in a better place—she's in an Alzheimer's home and she is very well taken care of—there is a sense that she's back in community. But she doesn't speak of her memories. I'm not sure she has them anymore, and so, in that sense, I think there's a kind of profound solitude that has to do with living exclusively in the present.

There's also a strong ethical sense to memory. There's a wonderful book about the ethics of memory by an Israeli philosopher whose name, of course, I can't call to mind at the moment, but the sense in which if you have a memory and you use it correctly, it's an ethical act. If you fail to remember certain important things, that's an unethical act. And yet, if you lose your memory to illness, it's something else again. So the difference between that loss of memory to illness and the loss of memory that the Bush administration tried to create for all of us, I think, is very telling that there are different uses of the erasure of memory, and in my book I was trying to negotiate a place from which I was encountering both at the same time. So, I don't know if that answers your question—

SCHWARTZ:
It's a wonderful response to the question. I'm so glad I insisted even though you tried to laugh the question off at first, because it's a great—and there's so much to think about in what you just said, the way in which, in fact, memory is communal, we think of memory at some level as a deep form of introspection, and it is, but at the same time certain kinds of memory, certain forms of memory would not be possible without a conversation, or without the wider conversation that is sometimes called community. So, that complexity, that complicated tissue of discourse and language that makes memory possible, you speak to so tellingly in what you just said, and in the book itself, Dementia Blog, which is really quite extraordinary.

September 24, 2010

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.