Sanders and Alcoholism

Sanders' essay on growing up with an alcoholic reminds me of my mother. Not that she's an alcoholic, neither of my parents drink at all, but from what little I know of her childhood, it seems she and Russel Sanders shared many of the same experiences. I've never been close to my mother's father. He was alcoholic and abusive to both my mother and my grandmother. When my grandmother died of breast cancer my mom was only 15. My grandfather drank more to cope and was left with only one real outlet for his aggression: my mother. My mom is a middle school teacher and is almost always soft spoken and smiling, unless the topic of her father is brought up, in which case she affects a much sterner personality, one which has no qualms with words like "bastard" or "motherfucker". There is clearly a sensitivity to the subject that she has never become comfortable with. I assumed, growing up, that her fierce rejection of any and all alcohol most likely stemmed from her relationship with her father, her experience as a witness to the primitive wickidness that alcohol releases in some people. Until reading Sanders' essay, I hadn't considered how my mother must feel about the popular portrayals of alcoholism in the media. Often, I've suggested "arty" films or novels to my mother only to have her express her strong distaste for them. Considering, now, how many of those films featured romanticized alcoholics and addicts, artists and neophilosophers struggling to cope with a harsh existence, I think I can see where she was coming from. Growing up with a man who's only recourse against a detested reality was to turn to booze has likely killed in her any notion of self-medication as a noble endeavor. Where I might see a character that represents my own dissatisfaction with society or the universe at large, she may see a grim reminder of the depths to which a person can fall. How struggling to keep from feeling the pain can heap the suffering onto those who share that life. My mother should have been able to rely on her father through the hard times, through the death of her mother at a young age. Instead, she found a hatred for trying to gloss over the pain, and I can empathize with that feeling. Sanders' essay struck me as being slightly self-indulgent despite, maybe even because of, his insistence that the form must be honest and personal. In the weeks since reading his essay, the section that I have thought of most is his rundown of the popular terms for alcohol and its clingers-on. Now, when I hear someone mention picking up some booze, I laugh at the childishness of the word. I can't help but see the cartoonish way in which our culture handles alcohol. I haven't decided yet how I feel about alcoholism, whether I believe it's a true disease or a weakness of will, but I know how I feel about its representation now. Amused and disgusted.

Night Song

The essay Night Song has a strong focus on scent and sound for building its scenes, due to the blindness of the author. The fact that these senses convey the memories of the author so vividly is the most interesting part of the essay, for me. I see the essay as being primarily about memory, since the beginning of the essay is detailing the author's first memories of sound, which are also his first memories in general. The end of the essay also strikes me as being focused on memory, with it's rhythmic restlessness. It's as if the essay is the catalogue of thoughts the author experienced during a sleepless night. I can imagine laying in bed myself, floating through memories with very little thematic relation, finding each one profoundly important and needing of my attention, despite the fact that they have no pertinent relation to falling asleep or even to the issues that are keeping me awake. That the recounted memories seem so dense is all the more impressive for their lack of visual description. I imagine scenes, complete with visuals, throughout the essay, but I know that my visual interpretation must be extracted from the mood of the writing, the language and syntax, as much as from the actual description. There's a melancholy and an almost surreal feeling I take away from the piece. The way the final paragraph becomes choppier and choppier, perhaps loosing the thread of memories as sleep moves in, is chilling in a way. The scenes throughout the novel have a certain wandering juxtaposition to their collection. They aren't even disconnected images, though, but rather disconnected sounds and smells and feelings. I can imagine the way the author might feel, laying in bed at night while scents and noises wash over him in a series of waves, in the same way that my own restless mind jumps from images of old friends, pets, houses, toys, books, words, to scenes, seemingly complete in their sensory stimulations, of the mundane and the seemingly minor. I wonder a bit at what the essay's point might be, what message it might be striving towards, besides the function of memory, but I'm so enthralled with the language, and especially with the rhythm of the piece, that by the end I don't care.

Amy Tan's Confessions

Confessions reminded me of my grandmother. She was my father's mother and was the go-to babysitter for me when I was a kid. I remember being spanked for touching her doll collection, and later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. My dad came in from taking her to Columbus for a doctor's appointment and sat me down.
"Your grandma has Old Timers," I heard. "She'll probably start to forget things soon, maybe even our names."
"Will she die?" I asked.
"They gave her medicine, it should help," he said, but it didn't. She moved quickly through forgetting names to forgetting pills to forgetting her age to forgetting how and when to eat. It was ugly and degrading and I still hate the memories I have of her weak and emaciated, dying because she didn't remember how to stay alive anymore.
But Amy Tan handles the issue of senility in a pillar of family authority with much more restraint than I would be able to. The first paragraph of Confessions stands out strongly for me. The way that she compares memory to an ocean tide seems spot on, and the imagery of being stranded upon the important, or tragic, events in one's memory is especially powerful. It remindes me of my grandma's fixation on her past, after the disease had taken hold but before it had completely wrecked her mind. She would insist she was decades younger than her age, or mistake her family for old friends. She would go from delight at someone visiting to irrate in a matter of seconds, needing only the time to forget who the person was and then attach an old memory to the face. The memories she seemed to live in most often were either painful and angry, causing turns to detest when she would mistake an identity, or nostalgiac and bubbling, instilling childish glee.
It was hard to witness as a child. I was confused by her behavior and by how a disease could cause such a drastic change in personality. The nature of brain chemistry was completely foreign to me, so I found much of her behavior offensive, but looking back, I find the movement of her memory fascinating. With the lack of a short term memory, Alzheimer sufferers are left with only their past and its jumping, chaotic interpretation and associations. The senile mind, with no strong narrative present to hold the disperate threads together, becomes more and more lost in reality. That the brain is effected so strongly by such changes speaks to how the healthy brain layers the past over the present moment to find meaning and give definition. The movement and function of memory is important to an understanding of humanity as a whole, and as with society, it's the descending, malfunctioning, extreme fringes that are of particular interest to me.