Basketball at Midnight

Dramatic. Everything about Budapest seems dramatic to me today, now that I’ve had some opportunity to go out and feel the city. I recall writing something about the buildings of Bucharest being made for really large humans or small humans riding ponies; I think my memory of things had already reconstructed it that way. Indeed, Budapest would suggest that they were built for normalish sized humans riding full clydesdales. It seemed to me that some countries could fit five or six normal stories into a 2 story + smaller attic space building on the main streets of Budapest.

Adding to the buildings (to note that the entire downtown is overlapped in three UNESCO world heritage sites), monuments, parks, and even bridges are all quite dramatic. Even the sky, and its shifting of overcast and nearly-clear-sun and complicated cloud formations (all in short repeating spans) feels dramatic…. and the rampant homelessness, majestic buildings doubled with for-rent signs (if not for UNESCO funds, I bet much of the downtown would look like North Broadway, St Louis).

The beggars confront me, which shocked me at first. Not dangerous confrontation, but they talk clearly when the beg. I don’t think I made comparisons with beggars before: In much of the Middle East, the beggers are silent, often sitting on the ground, heads down, arms raised. India has the wandering, usually quiet or “meeping” types of beggars who gently run outstretched hands into your shoulder blades while you’re in line. They might mumble a couple things, but the tendency is to not talk or to talk very little: culturally I think it’s somewhat inappropriate. The other type of Indian beggar was the well spoken storyteller who would talk about his family or the job he starts next week or the job he was told he would get if he moved here but did not get and then he would ask for money or, sometimes, some reasonable product that you could buy for him if you went for a five minute walk with him. Even these were legitimate, leaving us travellers to guess whether he sold it back or used it for other purposes. In Thailand… that was a long time ago now… I think…. I remember quiet street beggars with outstretched hands… Oh right! And those that would wait patiently, sometimes just still, silent, outside a restaurant, near you in line, watching their target. Again, generally quiet, as if waiting to be invited to ask for money. Here it’s more our western type of begging, “Excuse me, do you have some Euros for me to buy bread?” As if bread actually costs a few Euros. More clever beggars start in Hungarian and switch to English, as if they thought I was a locals.

Going back again to my last posting, I realized all sorts of holes and mistakes in my observations nearly as soon as I posted it… Sorry. I’m not going to revise it; that would be wasteful of time.

But I will go off on some personal reflections. This should be a new style for me, and at least somewhat reminiscent of the rambling I did earlier. You have the choice of reflective personal ramblings or character sketches from Bulgaria to the present, but I chose the former as I’ve done character sketches recently.

Those who don’t like the hyperpsychological modern american writers probably won’t like this. But I’ve been tendings towards walking for the past few days, and that sends me off. People who knew me would know… Or perhaps, if you knew me you might understand…. Even though I’ve told lots of people and several people have talked with me about it (big differences between those two), I have the impression that’s not a lot of people. This post will be full of tangents, as my thoughts have become increasingly overgrown and wild, like my hair was before I let a couple Bulgarian “artists” at it (I hope it grows back enough by my return).

Many of my current rivers of thought started on the train between Bucharest and Budapest. I had the compartment all to myself: me and five empty chairs, a window reflecting darkness on one side, and a window passing through the hallway to the distorted darkness on the opposite side. Every now and then I would look at the distortion and jump, thinking I saw a person
watching me (more than nerves, people did periodically come down from other compartments to use that bathroom at the end of the car). Steinbeck’s East of Eden was consuming a lot of my time between breaks for thinking.  It deals with a lot of great topics- truth, belief, perception, “goodness”, emotion… His style reminds me of Hawthorne and makes me think that a Hawthorne with better subject, or a Steinback with worse subject, would be about the the same as the other.

Anyway, at a chapter break, my thoughts wandered off to consider journaling or writing (I carry two notebooks with me and four ways of writing (left to right and right to left in each; one book is for “realish” things, journaling and studying, and the other is for “ingenuous” things (IN [not] + GENUINE), freewriting, poetry, “ideas” on things to do in the future); and I didn’t want to journal because it takes a long time to journal and it can only really get at one path. My thoughts are always divergent, and I would much rather follow the entire tree down until I have mapped out the roads through hell (adapted from J. Gardner, Grendel) than preserve one tree. Given my two great deficits, as they occurred to me then, it creates a huge contrast.

So what are these deficits? Do you know them? Here is what occurred to me:

What seems to possibly be a neurological problem with my hearing (I believe I tried to explain this to Z, although it might have been someone else). It’s not as big as it sounds, nor am I a hypochondriac. But it’s like this: I have trouble understanding things that I hear. Nothing new, when I think back to my first ten years calling a “direction signal” a “dereckshursignal” or my constant need to pay very close attention to someone talking to actually understand what they’re saying. It helps to explain why I would never pay attention in class, and frequently would copy whatever was on the board on the left side of my notebook and work on my own inventions on the right side, or skip class through the semester and read the book the last three days (not that I’ve graduated, you can say anything you want about that trend)… and the “neurological” comes from my memories of the Exceptional child class, in which we made a distinction between hearing problems (problems with hearing the sounds) and neurological hearing problems (I forget the exact term, but the interpretation of the sounds)… I always passed the beeping hearing tests.

So what’s the point of all that? Well, as my mind conceived it the other night, I would commonly reconstruct what was said based on how I understood/interpretted what I heard. For those of you that heard about the thirty something page paper on the 12-page third chapter of Ulysses (a book of which I skipped half the chapters) or my references to “interpretting colored symbols on a veil” (seeing), there has never been much of a difference for me between perception, projection, imagination, and memory (the thesis of my paper suggesting that Joyce felt the same thing, as proven in Chapter 3, with support from Chapter 12 and Finnegans Wake).

How does that fit into the conversation… err… discussion… errr…. posting. Ah! I’m not sure right now, but perception and construction (projection) are both chocked full of what my mind is really getting at, regardless about whether or not my writing portrays that.

To break away, are you ready for my second deficit (and it’s not my spelling!): memory. If anything worried me substantially, this would be it. If you haven’t noticed, and you may not have, my memory is scarily poor. Monumental events in my life, even somewhat recently, I have completely forgotten. Names, faces, dates (what day it is, for sure), all poof almost as soon as I know them. Kevin (not me, Clear!) was the first person whose birthday I really remembered (within 1 day…. I waver between the 25th and 26th), and it wasn’t until High School that I had a real graps of my parents’ birthdays (it wasn’t until I could link it by their anniversary that I now usually right). Emily+Kate+Penny are all easy because the first two are eerily anchored by a holiday; and less eerily, so is Penny’s . I have seasons for most other people, and aside from big events (Jessica Tanis’, if you ever read this, know that I remember yours is sometime around high school finals because there was that balloon thing that happened. I moved into the house and met Z during the week before her birthday)… The other day, an entire deluge of really really life altering things told to me during frosh year, college (not life altering to me, but that I heard them) returned to me: things that I had forgotten for years. That’s the thing, too…. I feel that I can remember crazy things, and that my memory is absolutely vivid, but it’s entirely disjointed, asynchronous, and unordered. I lose things from the day before that I should remember, and I can quote volumes from things I read in High School.

So memory, perception, and failures in both. What’s the point, Kevin? If you don’t see…. ok… so here I go trying to wrap it all up. First a middle step:

both with the failures in perception and the failures in memory, my mind unconsciously fills the gaps. Here’s projection, which I’ll define as the generation of a reasonable bridge. We can project into the future (I will be working when I return to St Louis) as well as in the past (Al Queda was responsible for 9-11). It’s likely to be true…. it might even be true. A big example; my mom told me I used to crawl out of the crib when I was little (big surprise, huh)… and now I have a distinct memory of ME crawling out of the crib in the living room and making my way towards the hallway. Is that a memory or a projection? I don’t know. I remember a time when I distinctly didn’t have that memory (I couldn’t find any memory that seemed to be before I was 6), but whether it just resurfaced or was generated, I can’t tell.

It was a long time ago that this first came to my attention, and I think the closeness of perception, memory, and imagination (to name projection what it really is) for me (as my memory and perception both have holes [HA! you didn't think I could link it all together, did you]) has helped to support my love of storytelling and playing with reality. For me, it has never been any more rigid than my imagination, and I’ve found I’m able to warp it by looking at it from different angles… and it still remains as true as it was before.

Ok, so the point of it all. I was sitting there, in the train, alone, contemplating all of this and heaps of tangents that stem from it and after the twenty-three seconds expired (projection), I began to consider my activities like so:

thinking and doing, roughly the same for me, are usually always intense, enjoyable or as necessary as anything else, etc. We could just say “good” and whatever your connotations are about it, that’s probably about how I feel.

Reading is ok when I have a break from the above, but I never really liked it (as you may know, I’ve only really read about 5 books on my free time before this trip; I would choose difficult, challenging books to read when I had papers and reports to do, but to freely read was a waste of good thinking time).

Writing allows me to record the thinking and doing for future time, to preserve a real record to show what I had been considering. This really appeals to the possibility of a future me, in another perspective, being able to look back and try to understand a more original (earlier, like the original of original sin) perspective… or, possibly, in my vainer moments (like now), allow someone else to have another clue to maybe understand a little bit about me. But then we have the linearity of writing mentioned way in the beginning, the terrible annoyance that gives me and the distortion it gives the reader about what I’ve been thinking…. and the limitations of words….  I met a guy in Bulgaria trying to invent his own language to be a theoretical international language, to be basic and simple and purely phonetical, consisting of only a few thousand words, so that everyone could speak and understand everyone else (it was his big college thesis project or something)… I complained, noting first that English is so mangled because people decided there weren’t enough words in old english and started borrowing from Latin and Greek, and then that there STILL aren’t enough ways to express even simple sentiments.

And on top of that, even though I can type fast (on my own keyboard, possibly as fast as a good secretary), I can never even almost keep up with my thoughts (maybe an hour here to put down maybe some of the main gist of my 23 (or was it 27) seconds of thought on the train).

So I would say skip the recording and keep the thinking, but with my deficiencies of memory….

Anyone still reading has probably had enough. I won’t go into the way in which I associate things. As if I really have any conception.

And all of that because I didn’t think I had given you a rant on my reflections in some time.