I Can't Remember #2

I can't remember the date, the hour, the restaurant. It was summer 1976, it must have been bloody hot. Can't remember the weather. The Chinese lady served the dish with egg and shrimp. She looked better than the thing she had to serve, a dish so completely and automatically Chinese that I had no further questions.

I can't remember when universe began. As far as I know Italo Calvino emerged from it to be its only source.

I can't remember if I read it in a newspaper, or heard it on the radio, that Jorge Luis Borges had gone. He went for a walk maybe.

I can't remember if it rained on 2nd of April 1989.

I can't remember how it came, gradually or all of a sudden, the notion that I had to deal with a fake.

I can't remember the precise date but I have the girl still in front of me, far out on the mole, she wears a short, white dress and stares at the surface of the surf maybe two and half a meter beneath her. I don't know her age. I am ten and a bit. It's summer. Her face is directed towards the south. There's adults around. Parents I guess. I can't remember what I'm doing on the mole. I stare at the girl in the white dress. Near the surf little crabs may be noticed, seagulls follow the surf north and south. There should be a light breeze. The scenerie is far from regular. It would have been far more regular to sit near The Horse, as that spot in Ostend where we always sat and built sand castles used to be called. It must have been my first erotic experience, that girl in a white summer dress. Did I take the mole to its very end? I can't remember. Steady curls of foam flooded towards the beach. I can't remember anything else but the white dress.

I can't remember why.

I can't remember the setting at Heist-Op-Den-Berg, the railway station where I most probably once a week stept out of the train from Antwerp to Brussels, the streets, the houses, or even anything more specific, nor the long walk - once a week - to the bakery, through streets that seem deserted now. The bakery doesn't add much to the picture. I slept in a caravan near the road, worked at night, read Hermann Hesse, but apart from the caravan, where I ate, wrote and slept and masturbated, the setting and its surroundings disappeared.

I do remember as good as anything, from the pictures of Miocene prairies, from the glorious and ignominious battles wherever on planet Ass, from the curly phrases in Mozart pieces such as Ein Weib ist das herrlichtste Ding, from the lost lands of Dodo, from Melopee, considered by at least one virtuoso to be his favourite poem, from Satyricon and Under Milk Wood to each of the movies Hitchcock made, but there's still more that I can't remember.

I can't remember how many tullips, yellow and unbearable depressing, in that vase on the table, nor if ever since tullips yellow on a table - and in a vase or not - made such a disturbing and irrelevant impression. The table must have had many more features depressing and unbearable or awesome and as such forgotten, but despite of forgetful thoughts kindly clearing the table with waste and age, nothing seems more depressing still than yellow tullips on a table in a vase. The number has a safelock.

I can't remember the Sicilian style. A chessmate told me that his brother had studied on it, but he too had more or less forgotten how it went.

I can't remember how I came to Die Kunst der Fuge, with Lionel Rogg's organ version or with the multi-instrumental and charming version Munclinger made. Apart from that I do remember the August performance of Die Kunst der Fuge on a rainy day in Salzburg. It had rained for more than thirty-nine days. On the fortiest it again rained. Rain rattled on the roof of the church, a small, rectangular building downstream Mozart Bridge. The organist, a musician from Switzerland, began the B A C H modus and all of a sudden a heavy rain came down and took the interior of the church with power overwhelming.

I can't remember the first photograph I made. One of the very first may have been that of the plough horse and a willowed meadow.

I can't remember how I got that first, clear impression of the non-existence of god. It maybe began in a rather early stage, before that of teenage, when foolish things told didn't match the awareness of the untold. The probability whatsoever got suspicious before I got ten years old. I had of course to accept most of it as the truth it was told to be, but certain elements of that truth failed to make sense. With classes on the theme I used to stare at the rooftop of the building, gambling the told and untold. In favour of the untold I took from the told that it had nothing else but indecent and imbecile prepositions on the thing said. As far as I can remember I have never been in favor of the thing told. Priests always had that imbecile thing of telling nothing. Any plaster cupid could do better.