A Girl in Boston
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Alexander Pope
I watched the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. I am not sure why I took me over a decade to partake of this thoughtful, funny, and deeply poignant film. The film's title comes from a poem by Alexander Pope (not Pope Alexander, inside joke from the film). Get this, first watched The Terminator this May! My reviews are not Rotten Tomatoes but Gone Tomatoes.
I know a good deal of my readers will be stunned by my long wait to see it and be thinking "Eric, get with it. This is old news." Maybe it was avoidance because I knew it might stir up some memories like dust on a book taken off a shelf for the first time in a long time. Rom-Coms are not usually my go to either.
The poem by Pope is practically a book by itself and would take a semester of a Freshman English class in college to fully masticate and digest. My take is that memories, although dead, are very much alive. There is a cost to remembrance but a greater loss is forgetfulness.
The film delves into the idea that this doctor can erase memories in patients by zapping their neuronic basis. Maybe like this Pokemon nonsense. In this case, a relationship between a guy and a girl where they both have undergone the procedure, but the man literally has second thoughts--and then so does she with him in his head somehow--while in the treatment.
The film has that wonderful dream-like part where the subjective lives of the man and woman play it out in time and space. Much like our lives do 24-7. Our lives are both prose (fiction and non-fiction) and poetry.
Before I watched the film, I had a Facebook Message back-and-forth with my buddy Matt who I brew with on occasion. Facebook had posted a picture of the Belgian Wit that I had brewed 5 years ago in its Memories of my account. The Belgian Wit was a truly volatile brew. I had fermented it initially at too high of a temperature which (my theory) caused the yeast to gobble up almost each and every molecule of sugar in the wert and over-carbonate the bottles, then which then blew up like Iraqi Insurgent IED's, at semi-regular intervals, seemingly always in the middle of the night down in the basement. Boom!
The bottles didn't blow up all at once but as a steady stream of explosions for a week or two until I opened all of the bottles, watched good but over-carbonated beer fountain into the sky and fall to the ground, then I rebottled the remaining beer. Which then went flat as a board, causing me to wonder what to do next. Then, as if by miracle, the Wit re-carbonated after two months of me dawdling about the awful task of pouring out flat beer. There was just enough sugar and just enough yeast to do the job right the second time. A beer never tasted so wonderful...yet the eleven lost bottles were like lost soldier buddies who had died in the war. Joy mingled with sadness.
Let us put it this way, these bottles exploding, going flat, and then recarbonating has been the story of the last 5 years of my life. I am in a great place now. Don't screw it up Bierker. I seemingly create drama out of thin air if I don't have any.
I made a comment to my buddy that this Facebook Memories function ain't all sunshine and rainbows. There are a lot of clouds back there, too. Difficult and painful memories are like exploding bottles. They explode into our present from the past, shards and all. Suppressing the pressure only creates more volatility, expression frees the mind and soul internally--even if leads to pain and then numb flatness for a while.
One of the film's message is that in losing one's memories, you lose you.
Strangely, when watching the film, I recalled being in Boston one Spring back in 1992. I was chaperoning a middle school trip to Boston and environs. I was working a dual position as a high school and middle school counselor (a real two master's deal if there ever was one) and had a very difficult and painful year. I knew ahead of time that middle school wasn't for me but had been promised in the job interview that the position--after a year--would become two. One position, middle school counselor. The other position, high school counselor.
About mid-year I found out that I would not get the high school position because they felt they would need a woman on the Guidance staff to balance out the maleness of the department. Since my gender was pretty obvious from the start, I thought that I had been presented incorrect information during my interview to influence my decision-making, with the hope that I would choose the middle school position. Maybe I should not have worn a dress to the interview, eh? I thank God for many things but one is my gender. A 6'2" female with acne scars on the face would scare away almost all men. Not that this is fair but since when is life fair?
I had not overtly expressed my strong preference for the high school position during the interview process. I played my cards carefully but the school district played their cards unethically. I felt betrayed and lied to and had to quit at the end of the year. Working in a middle school was like a voyage back into early adolescence and there was no way I wanted to stay there for a career, on that anxious island of the early and awkward early teenagerhood.
The trip to Boston was a fitting goodbye to the kids, who I cared about. The staff was a negative bunch on the whole with a couple of exceptions of truly fine educators. So, I couldn't wait to shove off in reference to them...a mutinous bunch, some who seemingly hated kids (there was a subtle but real war going on between the staff and the principal that I had unwittingly stumbled into, and I was seen as the principal's right hand man. I was so young and naive).
I recall while in Boston proper that a middle school boy in our entourage had hopped on the wrong subway. In a panic, I jumped on the train to stop the doors from shutting and to pull him off before he wound up in parts unknown. In that millisecond, I calculated how losing a kid in Boston would be a fine ending to a disastrous year. This was before cell phones of course. I hoped, had we not been able to pull him off of the train, that he would have the good sense to hop off at the next stop and ride back a stop. But, remember, this was a middle-school boy, not exactly a rational creature.
While I was breathing a deep sigh of relief that I would not have to call the principal and parent from a pay phone that we had somehow lost a student and son in Boston, I saw a girl (really a woman, about the same age as me, but we are all still boys and girls in a way, even when old). She was very attractive, long brown hair, sensitive eyes. We made eye contact through the window. She looked at me, I looked at her from about 7 feet away from another. We had a moment that lasted an eternity where we both recognized that the subways of our lives were not to be the same and the memory has lasted to this day. Had I been alone, and not with a gaggle of kids, I may have just hopped the train. It might have weirded her out and end of story. Or it could have been a wonderful beginning. Who knows.
As the train released its brakes, she smiled. As did I. And I watched her disappear. Again, I am not sure why this memory has persisted among the thousands that have been chaff to the wind. I think it is because my relational history is really checkered with a lot of failure and I am pretty content at this point to let it rest and not resume the dance. But this memory, as small as it was, was pure and beautiful, untarnished by missteps, misunderstanding, and meanness. Both sides.
I am at peace to let the train leave the station as long as it leaves the memory...like a taste of a beer long past gone.
The Explosive Wit
Just remembered that the film was set in Boston and a train plays heavily in the plot. DOH!
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