daron aric hagen

I once wrote of poignancy and sadness shocking me into recognition of other times and realities, of a child's awakening to the horrors of the Holocaust caused by a glimpse of his piano teacher's tattoo, of an ecstatic street preacher waving a bible as he shouted himself hoarse, unheard, as he stalked up Broadway, of cradling my dead mother's head, midnight drives in search of suicidal relatives, the grace of gifted teachers, of the simple joy of running.

Not only Proust's 'other selves' being joined to the present touched off by a sip of tea and a mouthful of 'one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites Madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.' I was, I am, I will be? No. More shattering: I was, but can never be again; I will be, but never equal to my hope. There, perhaps, is poignancy and sadness, a sense of dying selves totally incapable of being re-invoked. Instead of Proust's pattern (a mosaic for a complete self) a dis-organization, the incapacity to find a connective meaning.

I wrote of the 'intense satisfaction taken in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven's did two centuries ago,' of places like Yaddo 'where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free;' I've penned stream of conscious paragraphs covering two decades' worth of Venetian memories, woven delicate word rondos alternating Ned's diary with mine; I've described moments when I realized that the world was opening up for me, described watching my son as he 'held infinity in the palm of his hand'-if only fleetingly.

Why does Virginia Woolf also insist upon continuity? Does this insure personal significance and sanity? Suppose you were rifling a deck of cards-turn up one card, then another, unrelated suits. Chance turns up the card. This, we'll say, is one moment-a strange moment, saturated with a sense of profundity: (because it is shared with a loved one, because your finiteness is pressed home by externalities, because of a revelation of beauty in actions, character or things.) It is an important moment. There is no method of predicting the time or place that card (or moment) will turn up. It's a casual, chance thing. In the card allegory, why must the suits be forced to match? Or-

Say you had an uneven necklace-one thick bead, a small one, etc. The only connection being these beads (these moments of revelation) occurred on the thread of a single life. They are totally unrelated in size, importance, and comprehensibility but are connected by physical occurrence.

This is the sense and continuity of life, but these are the sudden moments of beauty and their beauty is in their mystery, their inability to be explained: you can't strip them to the bare and ugly bones. It's all that makes life possible, perhaps.