I stand in-between. It’s a particular, locatable place: a here. Four discrete stage sets confront each other. I am as much in Aunt Mavis’ middle-class parlor as in the cellblock, as in an emergency room. Sense of place segues, now there, now there, with that irresolute flux peculiar to dreams. I have no volition. It depends on the director: how camera one or two or three will project me, stick me into context. This CBS soundstage is a simile for all soap operas, which are, don’t laugh, a pretty fair simile for human time remembered. If it’s true that life plays back before the inner eye at death, then most of us will come up with test pattern and not much else.
I keep a diary. But for those blunt notes, I could at best recall a hundredth of my more than 12,000 days: marriage, two births, a funeral, an operation and. an accident, a betrayal and the football game where I made 11 unassisted tackles. Soap-opera things. Surely not bills paid, another page written, mufflers under repair: the housekeeping-bookkeeping events that any soap opera must let slip. This afternoon Love of Life will chronicle 1) a cerebral hematoma, 2) half a seduction, 3) a homosexual rape plot. All happen, as dur strong memories rehappen, in one klieg-lit, unpartitioned, over-lurid time/space.
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