Für Elise, or Notes on Time and Memory

We stayed there for I don’t know how long. In my memory it was hours. Time enough anyway for me, eventually, to feel that I should begin to attempt to explore some of the surfaces that had so hypnotized me. I made a few efforts in that direction, and soon after that, the moment ended – not harshly or in any obvious sense “finally” – I don’t think my tentative explorations of her body provoked anything negative, in other words, but rather, simply, that we ran out of time and needed to go back home. Not that that can’t be a fundamental shift in its own right. And maybe it is the most fundamental shift of all – we run out of time.

We stepped back into the bright light, and the moment was over. We left the cave, and not only did we never go back to that cave, but neither of us ever mentioned it again. It was a moment out of time. We were children at dawn, and however fragile time may seem, the same day never breaks twice.

Have you ever tried to draw anything? I mean, to draw exactly what is there – visible – in the world at that moment, with all the omissions of the unseen that implies? If so, and if you really put serious effort into it – and if you’re anything like me – you were blown away. Because you can stare at whatever you’re drawing and try to draw it with lines on the paper, and the lines you draw are not the lines you are actually seeing at all. Try as you might, you draw the lines you expected to see. You know eyes are round and that smiles tilt up, so you draw those things – except eyes are not round, and smiles do not always tilt up – it depends on your perspective.

Drawing is not about drawing, it’s about seeing, a battle to the death between expectation and reality.

Everybody knows that drawing is not about drawing in the same way they know we swim in an ocean of the unknown. We know it but ignore it. It makes no difference at all how coordinated your hand is. Drawing is about seeing. And you draw what you expected to see.

Unless you’re trained, you don’t even know that’s what you’re doing. All you know, if you’re honest, is that the lines you drew do not really capture the essence of what you actually saw. And no matter what you draw, how many things you try, or where you look – it is the same way. No matter how many times you try to draw it, unless you learn to see it differently, you will never get it right.

And what that means, more fundamentally, is that wherever you look you pretty much never ever see what is actually there. Even in that very simple way. You only see what you somehow expected to see. We walk through our lives projecting our expectations, like light from a flashlight reflecting off of smoke in a cave, onto the canvas of reality.

Oh, reality shapes what we think we see to some degree or another no doubt – sometimes it smacks you in the face. But what we think we see has only the most arbitrary and evanescent relationship to reality conceivable. There are all the waves of various sorts that we never sense at all in any way directly. There are all the particulates – very, very small pieces of things floating around in the air of which we may be equally unaware – but ask a dog tracking a scent how obvious that little slice of reality is to him. There are other things too that aren’t even in our dimension – memory and imagination to name just two – swirling around us of which we are not aware in the slightest… so we even think we know only an unbearably small portion of our reality in the first place. And even that we cannot truly see. We see only our projections.  Knowing this, how could one not be profoundly, constantly humble regarding our observations and conclusions?

And time passes, we think. At least we take the stage, play our lines, and exit forever. The days we spend, the love we live, our passions and our pursuits… all smoke in the wind.

But this is for Elise, the girl I spent that time in the cave with.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother playing the piano. She played several pieces – many, perhaps, although since she never took lessons during my life, maybe it wasn’t so many after all. She played music by Bartok, Schumann, and Beethoven, mostly, and my favorite, which she probably played more often than any other, was Für Elise, by Beethoven.

Für Elise is such a beautiful piece of music. I was disappointed at first to learn, many years after hearing my mother play it so many times, that it was written as a practice piece for one of Beethoven’s students – a girl named Elise. If you know the piece, it’s hard to believe such a haunting and romantic piece of music could have had such a mundane origin. But things often become different in the mind of the listener or viewer, don’t they? An exercise teaching a girl some specific musical technique can turn into a masterpiece that haunts generations. A thing that occurred during a passing moment and seemed of little import at the time can have consequences that last a lifetime.

Perhaps most things are like that.

The Mirabeau Bridge

Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
And our love.
Must the memories remain?
The joy comes back still only after the pain.

Let the night come, sound out the hour --
I’m abandoned by time out here on this tower

Hands holding hands we rest face to face.
Under the bridge of our arms
The waters flow on by with somnolent grace,
Wearied of lovers’ eternal embrace.

Let the night come, sound out the hour --
I’m abandoned by time out here on this tower

Ah love passed us by like the water’s flow!
Yes love passed us by --
Life bleeds itself low,
And even hope’s touch can land with a blow.

Let the night come, sound out the hour --
I’m abandoned by time out here on this tower

The days slowly drip into years down the drain.
Neither time that has passed
Nor lost loves come again.
And under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.

Let the tears come, sound out the hour --
We’re abandoned by time now here on this tower

(Adapted and translated from “Le Pont Mirabeau,” Alcools, by Gillaume Apollinaire)