Clocking Memory
“A sequence of overlapping periods in which I did not hear this clock at all stretches through the capillaries of memory, back to my childhood, when the clock spoke regularly and with dignified authority in the entry hall of my grandparents’ house.”–By Anita Sullivan
The Highest Cauldron
By Anita Sullivan
“And if there is a silence that falls inside certain words, when, how, with what violence does that take place, and what difference does it make to who you are?”—Anne Carson (Nay Rather)
EUGENE Oregon–-(Weekly Hubris)—7/21/2014—Lying in bed in a silent room I am hearing the voice of my grandfather’s clock as if it were striking downstairs and the sound coming up.
The clock does actually stand in the ground floor living room of my house but, for over five years, the old family heirloom has been broken, unrepaired, and unplugged—a largish piece of furniture with no further useful function. Shortly before we moved to this house, it completed an eight-year stint standing fit but silent in the corner of a friend’s dining room, waiting, because I had no space for it in my apartment. A sequence of overlapping periods in which I did not hear this clock at all stretches through the capillaries of memory, back to my childhood, when the clock spoke regularly and with dignified authority in the entry hall of my grandparents’ house.
This is a family clock that I have inherited, but the total number of hours that its regular striking has been background to my daily routine has been pitifully few. How, then, can I be experiencing this voice so suddenly and so urgently, now? Or, rather, Why?
And yes, I am hearing the small, precise, fluid, metal voice of the clock, clearly. I listen to the full round of its pre-ordained set of tones, and the sensation is one of total familiarity more than anything else. Not surprise, not beauty, but “Oh, yes, you.” This is actual, not narrative memory: its story occurs only in present time, inside a voice.
The sweet uniqueness of that voice curls slowly through the room and my inner ear shifts position to follow it, as if I were watching a butterfly floating past, and turning only my head to keep it in view.
I do not actually hear anything: the sound was not triggered—more dislodged. Like a helium birthday balloon held firmly in place for days with a plastic clothes pin fixed to its ribbon, then freed to continue its interrupted journey to the ceiling.
This at a time when the sodden stupidities of thousands of years of human civilization are converging into a climax so terrible that Earth may soon totter into its Sixth Extinction. Awareness of this state of affairs is a coin of lead that many of us have been carrying around on our hearts for so long now that we have completely forgotten that it’s possible to be “light-hearted.”
It is as if–schooled by earlier extinctions–-a strange redundancy were slowly emerging, organizing itself into a larger world around us, in advance of the tell-tale signs of impending doom. An increment of this redundancy has shown up, for me, as the enhanced cellular memory of the delicately calibrated sounds made by a complicated set of brass gears and pulleys behind a rectangular face. Surely this machine is speaking—has always spoken—some necessary thing I will understand more fully at a later time. But there may be no later time and, only half awake, I will go out not knowing.
At the core of this memory (since the clock is not likely to be repaired, if that is even possible)—at the core is an eruption, gentle in execution, but potentially violent in persistence and spontaneity. A fragment of collective memory?
The sound of the clock inside my body has lifted the coin for awhile, floated it up a few inches, where now it hovers. Like a desert seed that lies dormant for weeks, months, even centuries, and begins to grow again at the simple touch of sufficient water, my heart briefly resumes an old habit of natural joy.
Anita Sullivan
Born under the sign of Libra, Anita Sullivan cheerfully admits to a life governed by issues of balance and harmony. This likely led to her 25-year career as a piano tuner, as well as her love of birds (Libra is an air sign), and love of gardening, music, and fine literature (beauty). She spent years trying to decide if she was a piano tuner who wrote poetry, or a poet who tuned pianos. She traveled a lot without giving way to a strong urge to become a nomad; taught without becoming a teacher; danced without becoming a dancer; and fell totally in love with the high desert country of the Southwest, and then never managed to stay there. However, Sullivan did firmly settle the writing question—yes, it turns out she is a writer, but not fixed upon any one category. She has published four essay collections, a novel, two chapbooks and one full-length book of poetry, and many short pieces in journals. Most recently, her essay collection The Rhythm Of It: Poetry’s Hidden Dance, indulges her instinct to regard contemporary free-verse poetry as being built upon natural proportional rhythm patterns exhibited in music and geography, and therefore quite ancient and disciplined—not particularly “free” at all. This book was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. More about her books can be found on her website: www.anitasullivan.org. The poet-piano-tuner-etc. also maintains an occasional blog, “The Poet’s Petard,” which may be accessed here here. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
6 Comments
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Dear Anita,
Synchronicity, among a group of writers, never surprises me, but you, Helen, William Ramp, Will Balk, and I seem now to be on very much the same page, if not writing/reading the same paragraph . . . attuned to very much the same grandmother clock. Thank you for this essay. The paragraph I chose to highlight on Facebook this morning is only one of several here I will re-read again and again to plumb to its depths.
Much love,
elizabeth
Will Balk
Exquisite piece…it is perhaps oddly coincidental -the grandfather clock in the old farmhouse of my mother, the tall case towering above our heads even now, is similarly unticking and not chiming…has been so for decades. I too know its slow and inexorable beat as if I am hearing it too. My grandfather’s brother made the clock. Now, after having read your essay, I cannot stop wondering about all that my antecedents made in their time – for us, for posterity – that are stopped, or broken, or discarded, or slowing, or made redundant. And wondering, too, about how much more is soon to be lost irretrievably. And now I’m wondering – perhaps there still is a clockmaker out there, some hidden horologist capable of reigniting the tick-tock pacing that provides only in memory a certainty of continuance. Thanks, Anita.
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Will, just this past week, in Pendleton SC, Charlie Moore’s “Blue Ridge Antiques” burned to the ground, destroying his many repaired clocks and, of course, all of his beautiful furniture as well. I know he repairs clocks, and may (I pray) still be reached at 864.646.6008. Dean and I saw him just weeks before this disaster, when I went “to visit a clock” he and I both loved and he would not sell.
Anita Sullivan
Thanks, Elizabeth and Will — I still have mixed feelings about what the ticking of a clock does in one’s life. In some ways it seems a rude and artificial intrusion, very “unnatural.” Yet the machine is something we make, and if we make it “by hand,” is that not natural? This clock reminds me that making certain judgments is frivolous and indeed, impossible. Again, thanks for your insights.
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
I’ve always believed that, since the first regular “time” to which we’re exposed is the maternal heartbeat, a large clock’s ticking–especially when it has resonance–is simply an echo of something immensely reassuring and comforting. At least, it always was for me . . . in my Aunt Willie Sue’s house.
Meredith d'Ambrosio
Dear Anita,
Your words make me think that causal memory surrounds your clock. I had chills throughout your lovely piece.
Meredith