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| Paramecium: complicated single-cell |
These old lyrics and this personal anecdote play in my head when I read "The Rememberer," especially right at the beginning when the narrator tells how she visited the "old biology teacher at the community college" to get some answers about what's happening to her boyfriend. Like in Barthelme's "The School," the school in this story is no place to get answers. The abundance of "why" and the lack of an acceptable "because" is Bender's playground. In it, she explores the anxious heart of humanity, how we all want to know why, and how in the end, we appear to have only the "one self" that we "put to bed." But the end of the story is not the story.
These two pieces show Bender seeking her source for the plural, rather than the definitive. Rather than trying to nail anything down, she opens things up. Her specific details--the glass baking pan and the great furry arms and the tip of a baby wave--suggest multiple meanings. In "Quiet Please," the symbolism expands from the setting in a library (where else to get answers, right?) to the ultimate man, the muscleman (who else would be able to fix a problem, right?) to the work of art, the fairy with purple eyes. Words, symbols, are magnificently plural, if we are open to this kind of magic trick. The singular becomes plural. Like a reproducing paramecium.
The Rememberer is a compassionate story about a woman whose lover undergoes reverse evolution. After her lover devolves into a salamander, she realizes she has reached her limits, and releases him into the ocean instead of watching him become less of a man. I really enjoyed this story because it encompasses real love, exhibiting her understanding and lack of blame. Before the husband becomes more primal, he says to her that there are too many thoughts in the world and there is not enough heart. In some ways it is appropriate for someone who wants more heart in the world to become an animal, yet also contradictory. I imagine birds building a nest and flying in flocks together, a good exhibition of heart. However in nature there are also aspects of ruthlessness and violence. Most newly dominant apes commonly commit infanticide in order to end the lineage of formerly dominant apes. Of course, heart has many meanings, and it is a blind statement to say that heart is only exhibited as compassion and love. The analytical and objective aspect of thought can inhibit heart, consisting of love, hate, and many other emotions. The narrator says that on one particular night, midway through having sex with her lover, they both had a moment where they were completely aware, wide-eyed and doing the dirty with the lights on. Instead of continuing, they both stopped and talked for an hour. It's funny but there is a dual nature to this memory. There is thought involved in the dialogue they wanted to exchange, however there is heart involved in the willingness to interrupt sex for a deeper emotional connection. In this way, Aimee Bender shows how thought and heart can become mixed and sometimes inseparable.
ReplyDeleteQuiet Please is a story about a librarian who has sex with several men to relieve her guilt after she hears of her father's death. After she has seduced and fucked several men in a back room of the library, she tries to seduce a muscle man from a visiting circus, but he does not have the same librarian fantasy as the others. Instead, he lifts up the couch that she is on and parades her around the library. Amongst the sex scenes, the story describes how so many times she had wished her father dead, and now that he is, she realizes that she didn't actually want it to happen. This story takes the physical embodiment of the phrase "Go fuck yourself." I think that she wants to be fucked by all of those men because she thinks it is a form of punishment that she can use to relieve some of her guilt. This story reads a little like one of those cheap books sold at CVS with a man riding a horse bareback on the cover and which probably mentions "firm" and "hard" and "took her" over a hundred times. This story also exhibits how pain can also be expressed through sex, and the sad attempts that many make to alleviate feelings such as anger, sadness, and remorse through such actions.
“The Rememberer” confronts a feeling a lot of people have when we “think too much”, that the world is sad and everything in it is sad. And in surreal fashion, Ben, the man who thinks too much, devolves into less and less intelligent animals. But does he gain more heart as animal? I don’t think so. He complains that the world doesn’t have enough heart, that there’s not enough compassion for our fellow man. But he takes the selfish way out and chooses to not think at all. In that sense, this story to me is more a story of someone trying to get over the loss of a loved one committed suicide. No one but Annie remembers who Ben was and everyone just stopped calling. I think the allegory of Ben devolving into less complex and less intelligent animals is Annie blaming and trying to come to grips as to why Ben, who was so intelligent, thoughtful, and emotional would kill himself. And her way of coping is to blame Ben, to think that he wasn’t really so smart and trying to simplify his motives into something easy to understand. She can’t accept that he killed himself because he was so sad about everything and the world and his thoughts were just too much for him. And when Annie lets the salamander Ben into the ocean, that is Annie finally letting go of the ghost of Ben, remembering him, hoping that he comes back, though in her heart she knows he’s finally gone for good.
ReplyDelete“Quiet Please” takes a different approach to how someone deals with their grief. The librarian chooses to have sex with a bunch of men to forget the guilt of her father’s death. It’s a stressful enough to have a parent die, but to always be wishing their death and finally getting it? It’s enough to make anyone act strangely. But while she thinks sex will solve her problems or at least make her forget, the grief always comes back, in this case as a muscleman in the circus. The metaphor of grief as a muscleman is very appropriate as grief is a very powerful emotion and you can’t easily control it. And sometimes the only way is to let it out. For the librarian, she draws a screaming mouth on the mural to express herself whereas before she was silent like the drawing with no mouth.
I think what I love most about Aimee Bender's work is the myriad of interpretations that are left open to us throughout her pieces. The emotions can be felt in a very real way, but the ideas can't quite be pinned down. In "The Remember", a woman slowly loses her husband to de-evolution as he questions his place in the world. Everything he is as a man and a person is reduced to a basic connection with nature and DNA and time, just as her relationship with him dissipates in the same way. As he becomes lost in himself, he finds less and less, and she connects with him less and less until finally she can't imagine searching for him with a microscope and sets him free before this happens. In some ways, I think this is symbolic of a failing relationship and the growing distance that accompanies losing something of yourself as a person you once knew well changes into someone unrecognizable. I love the small moments where Aimee Bender acknowledges the unfolding relationship in flashbacks, amping up the heartbreak when the woman finally wildy waves goodbye to the salamander swimming off into the ocean. The image of Ben the tiny salamander lost in a vast ocean gives me a huge feeling of loss which I didn't think would be possible with such a surreal piece.
ReplyDelete"Quiet Please" leaves you feeling much the same sense of loss and horror, as a librarian deals with her father's death through sex with man after man in the backroom of a library. I find the detail of her giving book suggestions to children just five minutes after the most jarring and real, as well of the images of the purple-eyed fairies on the ceiling, something that is just slightly wrong when you look at it for too long. The focus of this story and what we want and don't want, what we see and don't want to see is shown through the black redrawn mouth of the screaming fairy and the librarian's wish for her father to be dead and subsequent crippling grief when he does die. The final image of the screaming fairy is horrifying in a deep and visceral way, skewing a childhood library into a dark place of uncertainty and corruption.
I was struck by Aimee Bender's brilliant use of symbolism to communicate the overwhelming feelings of grief and sadness brought on by the chaos of life. This is maybe more true of "Quiet Please," -- the overwhelming sensation of grief and guilt. This tidy, neat librarian who is quiet and composed doesn't know how to handle the death of her father (does anyone actually know how to handle that?). To deal with her emotions, she has reckless sex with men she sees milling about the library. Her neat, buttoned-up composure is let loose; she is free to give herself over to these men in acts of passion as a way of dealing with any real emotion at all. Then when this muscleman doesn't indulge her, instead literally lifting her up to reach the ceiling, she feels exposed and off-balance -- this time unable to put herself back together is if nothing is wrong because now the library is in a state of complete chaos. Men are throwing books -- it's like the circus. The final gesture of the librarian burying agin her anguish as her father is buried in the ground, with the fairy now frozen in time with the pencil-drawn scream -- it is just such a powerful and symbol of how the librarian feels, and how we all feel sometimes as humans trying to deal with things much bigger than ourselves.
ReplyDelete"The Rememberer" is similar in its use of symbolism, but instead it conveys such a quiet sadness. The lover in the story who evolves into lesser beings is most likely symbolic of the narrator's way to evade the reality of the situation. Ben most likely suffered from depression, the sadness he often talked about, until one day (or at least it is implied by his absence) he commits suicide. The narrator finds it easier to describe him as a gorilla, a salamander, etc. until she releases him into the sea. This symbolic gesture has so much weight to it, I almost find it difficult to explain -- the idea that this struggling human is now lonely and hoping for a future that won't come. The sea -- this vast ether in which we know so little -- is symbolic of letting go -- of accepting there is no answer why things like this happened. But it's beautiful and tragic, the way life is like for all human beings.
These two pieces were interesting reads for me as a student caught up in the buzz of a college town. I've always loved to learn, and a large part of me still believes that knowledge really is the end all be all However, over the past year or so, I've started to discover that the type of knowledge we accumulate from books and institutions of higher learning may not be what leads us to the most satisfying life. Like the woman in 'Quiet Please' and Ben in 'The Rememberer,' I sometimes just want something real...something organic. We get so caught up in the whirlwind of knowledge surrounding us that sometimes we lose sight of what, in the end, are the most life affirming aspects of existence - in these two cases laughter, tears, sex, and dreaming. As a side note, I was a bit alarmed by the small excerpts of 'The Rememberer' presented in the introduction, but by the end, I ached for this keeper of memories. For me, this piece became something covered in fur which broke my heart.
ReplyDeleteWhat I loved about both these stories is that both touched on the fact that we are fragile creatures, something breakable. In "The Rememberer", the narrator's lover succumbs to reverse evolution. With each passing, day he regresses to a being simpler than human until one day he is nothing but a single-cell organism and to one day nothing at all. This transformation really touched the story's message that as human beings we think too much. We often get so caught up in our "alpha" species that we over think our place in the world and because of that we only end up hurting ourselves in the long run. That idea is what the two lovers in this story bonded over, this addictive sadness, and from this regression one must the other must open her eyes to a much grander world before her.
ReplyDeleteThe librarian in "Quiet Please" also reacts in similar manner, but instead of a physical regression its emotional. Upon hearing the death of her father, she lives in denial. She uses her primal, minimalistic desires to distract herself from the pain inside. The little fairies on the ceiling reflect her loss of humanity as even though she attempts to draw a smile on the face of the tiny figure, in the end it comes across as a cry for help in a world full of fragile beings.
I think that both of Aimee Bender's pieces were very insightful and interesting in their own ways. I really liked the symbolism and ideas present in "The Rememberer." I loved how that as Ben begins to reverse evolve, it kind of reflects Annie and Ben's relationship evaporating into nothingness just like Ben. As he begins to fade away, in a sense, she strives to remember him the way he was when she truly loved him. She still loves him as he is devolving, but the relationship is not as strong and she slowly starts to reach her limit in the efforts of sticking by with a man that is this new creature, someone she didn't start the relationship with. She begins to accept this loss of closeness in this relationship and she lets go as he becomes a Salamander and literally lets him go into the ocean. She will always remember him. They get so fascinated in thinking, observing and the knowledge of things that are much larger than they, that they forget everything else in their relationship and it begins to fade.
ReplyDeleteIn "Quiet Please," I enjoyed the presence of the character breaking down and mourning the death of her father in her own, albeit it strange and unusual, way. As the time gets closer to her having to acknowledge the death of her father, making it real, and having to say goodbye, she ends of sleeping with more and more men to take her mind somewhere else. I really liked the symbolism present in the very end of the piece. When the muscleman holds her, as if on a pedestal, high on the couch in the library, she is able to finally draw the mouth on that fairy. I took this as if accepting something, like the death of her father, also she is much higher in the air and in the presence of fairies, otherworldly creatures, that could possibly symbolize being closer to heaven, and in extension, her father. The next day she is even closer to her father's funeral and she is finally letting it hit her and has a much different mindset and set of emotions that day so when she looks at the fairies again, they are screaming as if in pain, just like she's been feeling inside from the death of her father.
If love at first sight is an accepted occurrence can love at first read also? For I think I am in love with Aimee Bender. She is a wonderful example of “show” and not “tell,” driving a deeply translated emotion under an abrupt, slightly absurd, and at times, comedic plot. Both stories then have the ability to be read at different levels. It almost reminds me of a children’s movie such as Shrek or Toy Story. While children take from the experience a fairy tale like story and parents, mature humor and meaning that goes over the understanding of their youngsters. Similarly, Aimee Bender presents us stories to witness as they play out and take what we level we wish from them. In “The Rememberer,” one could stay in the absurdity of the de-evolution. Yet her subtleness and blunt, almost stream-of-consciousness delivery from the main character still leaves room for more. I saw this story as metaphor of a relationship that is quickly deconstructing; the woman upset and helpless to the withdrawal of the man. It is ironic that his own over-thinking leads him to assess the world as “[drying up and dying] when there is too much thought and not enough heart.” She tries to keep him connected to her, to the physical world, through physical means like sex. He tries to draw her into the intangible, into dreams of the stars. Neither can meet the other where their heads and hearts are separating. And the world continues on without a care, “I told them he was sick, a strange sickness, and to please stop calling. The strange thing was they did. They stopped calling. After a week, the phone was silent.” Silently, she seems to accept where things are going and left as the only rememberer to what used to be. Aimee seems to do that with her main characters; they eventually realize in themselves something the reader has been clued into all along. In “Quiet Please,” the librarian is also trying to make sense of pain. Numb and empty at first, she is desperate to connect and feel something from the loss of her father. It isn’t until she sees her pain, that life is dragging her along, mirrored in the fairy. A childlike symbol of what should be light, beautiful, and enchanting is heavy, despaired, and overwhelmed.
ReplyDeleteIn "The Rememberer" the speaker's husband is caught in de-evolution and eventually she has to part with him because it was too painful. She plays with the idea of "limits" both in terms of not allowing the husband's un-evolved forms touch her and then later about not being able to see him anymore. I felt that the main character appreciated the relationship more when the husband was no longer human and with her. She didn't appreciate him enough when he brought her out of bed to look at stars, or when he would try to make her feel how he was feeling; until he ultimately couldn't feel anything with her anymore.
ReplyDelete"Quiet Please" by Aimee Bender involved a librarian that feeds her inability to cope with her father’s death with empty meaningless sex with strangers. The main character decision to avoiding dealing with death of her father reminded me of the movie ‘Silver Lining’s Playbook’. In the movie Jennifer Lawrence’s character ‘Tiffany’ had sex with everyone at her old job as solace after her husband’s death. The death of someone so close to both characters caused them to jump into these meaningless relationships because the real issue was too painful to deal with. I like how she used the angels painted on the ceiling to portray how the main character felt about what she'd done. At first she thought they were laughing and pulling the "mouthless" one along for fun, but at the end after she drew the mouth on it seemed to be screaming. The image of the angel at first seemed to be undecided, or "voiceless" but when reality caught up to her and she realized the weight of what she'd done and that it was time to deal with the ugliness the image in turn because ugly.
I enjoyed the author's way of including a general theme of human limitations in regard to emotions. In both pieces the main characters reached "limits" where it was too painful to deal with the reality that faced them, ultimately forcing them to act out and try to push it away or out of their mind. In "The Rememberer" she quite literally pushes it away where she in a sense abandons her husband because the situation became unbearable. Likewise, in "Quiet Please" the librarian tries to emotionally distance herself from the death of her father. The avoidance of dealing with their problems interrelated these stories in a way that seems very unique and genuine of the author.
Aimee Bender
ReplyDeleteI thought “The Rememberer” was a beautiful short short. The opening line explains the premise, “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution,” but the root of this story is the distance that grows between the two main characters. This surreal story is a metaphor for the husband drifting away in the relationship. (Literally drifting away in the ocean.) I like this story because the extended metaphor is a vehicle I am more familiar with. And despite the extended metaphor and surrealism, there is still a concrete story that gets told. The wife has to deal with this traumatic, yet ordinary seeming situation alone, she copes by letting her husband go, although pines for him once he is gone. This story gives us a lot to think about in how people handle difficult relationships, and when writing relationships how keeping concrete plausible reactions in important to ground a story as surreal as “The Rememberer.”
Quiet Please manipulates the reader in a different way. We see two almost cliché things, the “librarian fantasy,” and then the Librarian’s use of sex to fill the void of losing her father. These overtly sexual images then become juxtaposed to the fairies. Traditionally impish, childish, but also very wicked creatures which are used as a final image in the story. The librarian sees the fairy she drew a mouth and nose on being pulled and forced to dance, but only after the librarian comes back from the funeral. This is an image that made me really stop and ponder. Is the librarian to blame for the fairy’s open screaming mouth—after all the librarian did draw it. Is the fairy’s screaming mouth supposed to parallel the outlandish acts of the librarian? Or is this a way of showing how the norms of life can be thrown out in the event of something so life altering as a parent dying?
"The Rememberer" left me speechless. It was both tragic and poetic in its core. As many have already shared, I believe it is about a romantic relationship gone sour over time as Ben grows more and more distant and the narrator, at her breaking point, must flee the relationship and turns Ben out to sea. Once Ben is gone, Annie yearns for her lover and what they once shared but it is too late as the old Ben is gone.
ReplyDelete"Quiet Please" while still a metaphor, felt much darker in nature. The Librarian, mourning the death of her father, uses sex as a tool for escape for the bleak reality. I loved the line toward the end "You are not Cleopatra!" that is yelled by the businessman as he casts the first stone (or rather, book) at her. In the chaos that ensues, the Librarian seeks solace by drawing a mouth on the fairy but to her horror she realizes she has given it a frightening look instead. Perhaps this is a metaphor for childhood innocence and how once it is lost it cannot be regained?
The part of "The Rememberer" that resonated with me goes along the lines of what Amanda said. I feel that to an extent there are many people out there that could relate to the narrator. While I doubt anyone has had a significant other de-evolve into nothingness, there are definitely people that learn to appreciate their significant others after that other is no longer around to be appreciated. Even if they were to leave of their own accord, our forcing them, or any other reason it is still possible to want that person back or to realize just how much you missed the little things. Bender took something a lot of people go through and made it fantastical. She made it magical.
ReplyDelete"Quiet Please" also has a character who is yearning for the impossible. After the death of her father she seems to be searching for the affection she has lost by sleeping around. Using sex to cope with the passing of your father isn't exactly a great way to go about things.
I sort of fell in love with the story "The Rememberer" because of the language that was used in it, and how the story of a couple growing more and more distant from each other was presented. Rather than telling a straight forward story about a man and a woman, where the man slowly distances himself from her until she is forced to let go, we are given the situation in a very magical sense, which I think makes it easier to sympathize with the narrator. If it were told as a traditional break-up story, I doubt I'd feel anything other than "just let him go already." With it being told this way, set in stages where we only get her point of view of what his opinion must be, it makes it feel so much more sad. It's like it was something that neither of them wanted but neither could stop it,
ReplyDeleteThis idea is then reversed in "Quiet Please" where the librarian lost her father, and not being able to cope with the loss, did all she could to take something back. In this case, it seemed like what she wanted to take back was power. She was able to get the men into bed, tell them it was never going to happen again, and tell them all to "shhh." Her inability to take power is then shown by the muscle man coming in and not obeying her wishes for sex. Rather, he uses his strength to lift her up and carry her throughout the room for things to be thrown at her, which is where she completely loses all the power that she had. When she draws the smile on the girl, and sees it up-close, it makes me think of that is how she felt in the moment of taking back power, happy. But when she sees it from a distance it is how she feels from that moment, which is frightened and forced to go along with her day.
Contrary to my fellow class fellow mates, I believe Annie is quite horny and is hallucinating. Ben might smell like an ape and is ape like at sexual activities as most male forms are. And I don't know why anyone would "fall in love with this story" because it is just rubbish and not the dog's bollocks. A'right cheerio young mates I hath attend university
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