Canetti, Coppola, and a Corridor

The other morning I was reading Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakesh, and early in the book, in a chapter on souks (bazaars) there is this sentence: “The guild feeling of these objects, their being together in their separation from everything different, is re-created by the passer-by according to his mood on each stroll through the souks.” On the first read, right as I finished stenciling “passer-by” in my readerly-consciousness, an image came to me, a vision of a true moment in time: walking in a hallway to the bathroom in the nearest movie theatre to our house, either during or just after seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders at age eight (1982) with my older sister. I write this errata out because I’m astonished at the process of time. Once there was something called 1982 and it was made pregnant with meaning for me because of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers and their only World Series appearance. In fact, The Outsiders came out in 1983, but such is memory. How can this process shape itself across my linings? Is this syndrome a solipsistic pleasure or is there another answer? I don’t know. But what is the fuse that drives the green flower? Every “I am…” sentence really is saying “I remember…” so “being” is all memory and all memory is “being.” The hatch and brood of time — maybe we will jump the life to come or maybe we won’t. Why would Canetti’s little vision beside a bazaar in Marrakesh be congruent to an old vanished multiplex called the Loomis Road Four in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 4293 miles away?

I am tempted to answer, Because Proust told us this is how meaning, whether occult or not, happens, this is what enlivens us — when we have something to tell someone, it is almost always concerning a shard of memory. We develop our personal habits to fit the straddle of another’s spindle. We get engulfed by sharing and recalibrating the events of our lives with the friends we make, the loves we water or abandon, the objects we cherish. Proust:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

We cherish Proust’s memory texts because he might have taught us more about memory than anyone. Impalpable drops abound — that is what I hold to in this season of great destruction, but also perhaps a greater love that has no high-end publicist and persists in a dusky nook, the corner of the yard, the park no one visits.

The corridor I went through in 1983 led to a bathroom at this nondescript theater. I had to do my business just after the show, where what most remains now are the words “Ponyboy” and the long ending where the two characters are in a bedroom of a country house — this is what my memory tells me. This film, in which I only remember that and a long fight sequence, might be the most important cinematic experience of my young life, though I’ve not even seen the film in the forty-one years of life since then because I’ve taken the essential building blocks (the proteins) of experience and melded them onto these grainy images given to full grain — as cinematic ones there is a myriad of grain to the blue denim on Ponyboy or the beige wheat outside: relics of life — things I’d one day have to find.

S.E. Hinton wrote the novel in 1967. And Canetti wrote Voices in 1966 or thereabouts. Now it is 2024 and these two works and the invisible line connecting them are keeping me up, trying to find the threshing point or through-line. They are both about journeys — those of young men and that of an old man and his wife. I’m not necessarily trying to decipher what my mind might be telling me, though it is tempting. It’s more what I don’t want to be told, because there is no lesson of the master in this seemingly modern incident. These conjunctions have been helping all through my life but they are becoming more and more interesting and abstract. Not like dreams, but like reality — or the parts of paintings that are not often looked at — the sky in the View of Delft or the burnished darkness behind the painter in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. What are these encounters? Can they be called encounters? Why not? But they are encounters elsewhere — off the page, but in a sort of nested reality. A friend talks of the new pop interest in getting into hypnogogic states — for fun or for creation. This is not quite that, but it’s not quite not. Canetti vs. Coppola has nothing on its outside face (not even the fact that I saw Megopolis only five days before — the first Coppola I’d seen in the theater since The Outsiders) except a prescription for more delight in the scatterings, in the scree, in the areas where the main audience is encouraged not too look. It’s in the not common Canetti observation (a linking sentence of sorts) that one can call out that “guild feeling” and the moods that add up to weigh the matter of our lives And then the textures and colors in those last scenes of The Outsiders, shot on Kodak color film. What can one take from this? That, according to Tennessee Williams, a work of art is short and a man’s life is long? Or is it the other way around and they are actually wrapped around each other caduceus-like on the tree of life? And what of that bathroom and the return to reality and the body? The walk out in the sun from the artificial sun of the cinema. To name it is enough.

“The guild feeling of these objects” is a key six words, before the wallop of “their being together in their separation” — a sort of Heraclitian paradox in a sort of Heraclitian moment. We move forward through the morass and look at the world in parabolic ways. Life imitates art? How could it be any other way? Is there deeper tissue at stake? The “guild objects” are the patterning of life. Everything in my life led me to read that Canetti book forty-one years after seeing The Outsiders and everything (“being together in their separation”) wave-like reverberated back off a massive sea rock of mind, the sweep and carry in it shuddering as it retraced itself back through water it originated from. “The child is the father of the man” is perhaps too gauche and obvious but it is the best surreality to apply to this gilded moment in and out of time.