My name, which does not belong to me: Olivia Rosenthal, Paul Valery, and Dr. Alzheimer

My pen pal/copain, Alain Cressan, sent me two books in French the other week. The first, Je me souviens, by Georges Perec, was a pleasant surprise, especially after teaching Joe Brainard's I Remember again. The second book is one I can't get my nose out of, namely Olivia Rosenthal's On n'est pas la pour disparaitre, published by Editions Gallimard in 2007. (Please excuse my lack of diacriticals.) The book is what might be called a documentary novel. It's about Alzheimer and his disease, in voices that range from that of Monsieur T, who has Alzheimer's and dreams of America; his wife, whom M. T. stabbed; their daughter, toward whom the father has made sexual advances; and the author's (is it?), who meditates on writing about a disease she hopes not to acquire. She, who does not have children, also contemplates what it might mean to be a descendant of Dr. Alzheimer, given such a name, a blood-line's memory of the disease that denotes memory's extinction. It's a busy book, but one that can be turned (metaphorically) to many angles, like a sad diamond. Then there are dialogues like this one:

Combien avez-vous d'enfants? [How many children do you have?]
Plusieurs. [Several]
Pouvez-vous dire leurs noms? [Can you say their names?]
Oui, bien sur, ce n'est pas de leur faute. [Yes, of course, it's not their fault.] (47)

Such are dementia's non sequiturs.

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This was the week my introductory level students wrote documentary poems about a relative they do not know well. One women wrote hers on the backs of photographs of her grandmother, doctored ones (as it were). Her grandmother suffers from Alzheimers. One photograph is of her grandmother's face, cupped inside two hands. The documentary method is not simply about presenting facts in a form usually divorced from Wikipedia, but also about creating room for the poet and her audience to feel for their subject, even feel they are their subject (by blood or adoption). Monsieur T. stabbed his wife; Monsieur T. cannot be condemned for this act because he does not have even the wherewithal to "act" as an Alzheimers sufferer; he is one. Demented people cannot act.

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"Each moment exists at the center of an incalculable confluence of things. Some of these factors we have singled out and called by different names (sociological factors, political, psychological, spiritual, etc.) but some remain nameless. In the same way that physicists have not yet determined all the components that make up matter, we do not completely know what creates and makes up 'the moment.' What we do know is that the moment has a texture, and that in memory it can also be experienced as a weight--can press against the flesh." (Ellen Hinsey letter to Uta Gosmann)

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And yet among the heaviest moments are those spent with Alzheimer's patients, those whose memories are lightest, have flown, whose bodies seem to have supplanted their memories, like containers that take the place of what they contained. The textures of forgetting are dense, heavier than the furniture in the "home," the solid entertainment centers and Ethan Allen chairs, the suburban couches. Forgetting occurs (can it occur, really?) in comfort. But it's stubborn, immovable.

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Rosenthal asks us to perform exercises. One is to calculate the number of persons to whom you refer in the past tense, but who are still alive. (And how about those to whom we refer in the present who have died?) My strongest piece of advice to a student recently was to ask her to "change the eternal present--experiment with other tenses." Dementia offers us the conditional, the provisional tense, the not-present or not-past or not-future tense. Invent a new tense for those who have forgotten you. It changes you, to be forgotten so.

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It becomes harder to believe in memory once you've seen someone lose it. Paul Valery writes of "Memory heaping and building in the dusk of our souls holds itself ever ready to restore to us what the universal flux withdraws from us instant by instant." (I'm teaching from Poems for the Millennium, Volume 1.) Is that like the restoration of an old house? Or like the restoration of a monarchy? Those restorations are not to what was. I had acquaintances in Williamsburg, Virginia who thought they were living in a restored colonial house, but really they inhabited a reproduction of such a house. Who could not say they had the better plumbing, the stronger walls? Better than memory is a new construction like that. Reproduction in the age of.

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Yet it is harder to believe that we are other than our memories when we see someone lose hers. She is alive, her voice (which is also crucial to our sense of her) remains much the same. But her voice has lost its words, except a very few. It is memory that furnishes Crusoe's island, according to Valery, "malleable memory, pliable to the moment's needs." But her island is her voice, and its shorelines have been eroded and eroded more. She says little beyond how nice it is to hear that everything is ok. To what part of her is that a solace? Perhaps some memory of her worries, those that fueled her, before she forgot how to fret.

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Rosenthal devotes nearly a chapter to the names of diseases named after people, diseases you/she/I do not want to die of. The names are markers of anxiety; simply to call them out is to raise one's blood pressure, begin to imagine end games, pains, self-losses. There is violence at the moments of recognition that one is related to Dr. Alzheimer by brain tissue, by forgetting. Monsieur T. tried to kill his wife. My mother attacked a caregiver. This (or that) is the moment when all agency is taken from them. The name, violence, and then "home." We care give, we assist live, we take care of them. You can see memory, like a dream of violence, draining from their eyes.

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Quel est votre prenom? [What is your name?]
Il ne m'appartient pas. [It does not belong to me.] (9)d