Rambling

I felt inclined to write this little thing today and, since it serves absolutely no purpose, is vaguely “intellectual”, and my vanity is telling me I should force someone else to read it, I figured I’d post it here. Please take it for what it’s worth, which ain’t much at all. Incidentally, there is a very small turn of phrase in here which when I wrote it inadvertently reminded me of a song from the old high school days. If anyone can identify that turn of phrase and the song, you win a prize. The idea of associating this generally fairly common turn of phrase with a song from high school is, incidentally, very relevant to the topic of this whole post anyway.
G

I coughed and, hearing myself cough, wondered whether someone hearing me would recognize that cough. Or whether I, maybe standing at a crowded crosswalk at a busy urban intersection waiting for the signal to change, would hear behind me a cough in the crowd and think to myself that it was, or that it sounded like, myself coughing. It wasn’t a deep or a guttural cough, really more of a clearing of the throat. Nothing particularly interesting or distinctive. Nothing attention-getting. I found myself wondering whether I would recognize the coughs of people I knew, people I cared about. I found myself, unintentionally, trying to remember the cough of a girl I’d dated in high school. Not that she had any particular cough or predilection for coughing. Rather, I have often found that when pondering some activity of the mind which takes place at a level something below consciousness, I often hearken back to that girl. Not that I believe it’s because of any particular fondness I have for her. Instead, I think it’s that I consider that time to be around the age of infancy of my adult mind. The place at which memory and sense perception first really began to work as they still work today. I may well be wrong in that thinking, and yet there she comes unbidden to my thoughts when thinking about my thoughts. So I try and fail to picture her coughing, or rather to hear her coughing, again, as if standing at a busy street corner in the city, a place I haven’t stood and heard anyone cough in as long as I can remember anyway. But as these thoughts are crossing my mind I remember the time I passed someone, in the mall I think, of all places, wearing a certain perfume. A banal, common one that I think has managed to hang onto some amount of devoted users throughout the past decade and a half. Maybe I had smelled it once or twice in the intervening years, but certainly not often, perhaps not at all. And all at once, there it was, hitting me with the full sensory force of a waking daydream, picturing, sensing the hallway between the living room and bedroom in her parents’ house, just outside the door, waiting, in a place suddenly rich with memories and physical sensations. Blurred lines between the present and the past. This instance was maybe my first strong sense of the uniqueness of smell among the senses and its peculiar strength. But the principles are the same. The principles that dictate how these things, events, places, people, become embedded in the brain and why certain thoughts arise at times and others don’t, and how they’re stored in proximity to one another in the depths of whatever it is they are stored in. So, coughing, and picturing myself listening to myself cough, and why it is that it’s a crowded city street or why it’s her and not someone else, it made me wonder, to gaze for a minute a little more deeply into the way I work, the way things are supposed to work, or do work. It made me wonder whether there is something special about those times, or whether I will always hold them up as the reference point for idle thoughts like these, and whether in some ways I don’t hold them up as the reference point for many other things besides. And what else has this power, so deeply captured by smell and marginally less so by sounds and images and touch. Would poetry, properly crafted, be better suited to drawing out of these thoughts their inner workings? Having written the poem, would it then be disposable, having served its purpose, whose entire import was probably inherently of a scope of interest limited to the inside of my own brain in the first place, and whose work being done can serve no further purpose but to remind me of things about my own memory which I may have since forgotten? Having forgotten them, it’s likely the reformulation of my own mind may, by then, have made whatever conclusions or sensory maps that I extracted moot anyway. Or maybe, just maybe, the words themselves become an incarnation of the sense impression which struck me, in whatever form it took, and reliving it can jump over the gradual rewirings and degradations which occur over time and reconnect, like an old-fashioned telephone operator, the two critical lines in just the right way to make the connection go through again, clear and unhindered, if only for a moment. Maybe so.