Paulino Lim Jr. ~~ Pandemic Dream Diary

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The Ways We Remember

I was hired at CSULB under the presidency of Stephen Horn. He went on to become a Long Beach Congressman, and died on Feb 17, 2011, at age 79 from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. Since then, I’ve followed news items on the disease, and watched a friend succumb and die from it. In a way, I’ve become obsessed with memory loss; I fret when I can’t remember names, titles of books and movies, and here have gathered my thoughts on the subject (before I forget). This essay looks at three ways of talking about memory: as identity, therapy, and epiphany. As identity memory faces skepticism that casts doubt on whether a particular memory did take place. As therapy, its effectiveness will also be called to question; how does it deal with memory loss caused by dementia? And as epiphany, its insight or revelation will also be questioned; is it “truth"? Such is the nature of discourse on a topic that has many sides — positive and nega...

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?

To write is to describe or find a word for an object, an idea, or a feeling. But to settle upon a word is to realize that other words can be used and, furthermore, may contradict the idea you want to express. Words that reveal can also conceal. A philosophical adage runs: Remembering is also an act of forgetting. Hemingway is said to have rewritten For Whom the Bell Tolls thirty-five times to conceal the sex from the censors. Hemingway also challenged readers to find a sentence in his novella The Old Man and the Sea that can be rewritten; the copyediting word for the procedure is “greening.” [I once attempted to track Hemingway’s novella in the September 1952, issue of Life Magazine at the CSULB Library; someone had scissored off the pages of the text. If there are literary critics, there are also literary thieves.] A writer is scrupulously aware of words. When you see a word you don’t know, e.g., pangolin, you Google or look it up in a dictionary and learn that it is an...

Is the University an Ivory Tower?

A metaphor from the 19th century, an ivory tower is a place where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits. To describe the university as an ivory tower suggests that it is a place of privileged seclusion, filled with professors who pursue their research interests under the mantle of academic freedom. At the start of their university career, tenure is their goal. They eventually achieve this by publishing books (preferably nonfiction) and writing scholarly essays to publish in journals, or read at conferences in their disciplines such as, the Modern Language Association and Philosophy Research Society. A colleague once told me that he had recommended for promotion an associate to full professor and found out later that the candidate had submitted a fake resume, he found out later. He told me, “I owe the university president an apology.” It’s too late. The president is deceased and my informant colleague and fake professor have r...

Keeping Balance

I was walking on the sidewalk when my cane slipped on the pavement and I fell to the ground. A strange sensation of falling . . . a momentary blackout of consciousness, then regained slowly with fear and terror. My right elbow bled, bruised by the concrete. I tried to raise my body, but could not get up. Did the fall crack my skull? Did I break my back? A woman and a man were walking on the other side of the street, and I called out for “help.” They came over and together, they helped me to my feet; the woman then called my home on her cellphone. How important it is that the healthy can help the impaired, and the young can help the old. I had a flashback of a conference at Long Beach Veterans Hospital, conducted by Dr. Pat Quigley, a nurse consultant, who gave presentations about “Preventing Falls and Fall-Related Injuries,” such as, broken hips and knees. Two Filipino uncles of mine, after a fall, spent the remaining years of their lives bedridden in a hospital. A German garde...

Memory of a Lost Friend

Paulino and Lupo Grageda and his painting Memory of a Lost Friend How do you relate to someone who is no longer with us – as the saying goes – but whose voice we still hear and whose face we still see in our dreams? Was the person a dear friend, a lover you broke up with, or a spouse you divorced? Whatever the case, they still inhabit your mental theater. My boyhood friend in the Philippines, Lupo Grageda who was born in 1934 and died in 2011, is still on the wings of my mental stage, waiting for a summon. It’s easier to do so for Lupo whose two gifts are hung in the living room: a framed picture of twenty-nine pinned butterflies and an acrylic abstract painting he captioned Memory of a Lost Friend . A painter’s depiction of memory, like a still from a filmmaker’s montage. This is perhaps how the living relates to a “dearly beloved” friend or family member. They are on the wings, waiting for you to apologize for not telling them how much you loved them, or failing to do what they ...

Gardening & Writing

The recent rains, that ended the drought in California, carpeted patches of soil in our home garden with weeds and flowering plants. Weeding is the first task, removing unnecessary plants, like deleting excess verbiage from a text. The moistened soil made it easy to till and pull out the weeds, leaving the alstroemerias and primroses alone. Pruning is the next task, cutting off dead leaves and tendrils that detract from the beauty of the flower. On paper, alstroemeria is a word; in the garden it’s a beautiful flower, also called “Lily of the Incas.” Lily evokes the biblical injunction “consider the lilies in the field and how they grow.” Inca recalls an ancient civilization and Machu Picchu. Three elements are at work here: Object Name Image The object may be a thing, a feeling, or an idea; the name identifies the object; and the image is the picture or phrase conjured by the imagination. A poet thinks of his love and write...