Gum Day

Sometime in elementary school, I think it was third grade, the whole class was assigned to write a diary each school day.  I had completely forgotten this (which is a funny phrasing, seeming to imply that I carry around a set of things remembered that the forgotten thing is missing from--when really I didn't know I had forgotten until I came upon the external knowledge that there was something to forget).  In fact this diary almost seems to be written by someone else.  Which is not so strange really, as everything written is in a sense written by someone else.  But I kept several journals throughout my adolescence, and rereading these years later always triggers memories that are not explicit in the text.  This diary, on the other hand, triggers no memory.  I do have memories from that year, and I find myself recounting these, trying to find one that relates to what's written in the diary.  It's as if I lived two parallel lives during that year, one that I remember, and one that I wrote about.

What did this other I write about?  The diary is a record of exuberant greed for a few kinds of pleasure.  He writes about wanting, anticipating, and receiving.  He's both adorable and creepy, but possibly only creepy because I know that I was once him, and yet I cannot find in him a glimmer of the internality I identify as myself.  The objects in circulation for him are toys, social events with friends, Magic cards, food, and most notably, gum.

The school I attended had a gum policy that in retrospect is an awfully silly example of the productive power of prohibition.  I don't know whether to call the policy idiotic or diabolic: gum was not allowed, except on Friday, "gum day."  The rationale for prohibiting gum was ostensibly, I think, to prevent sticky masses from accumulating under desks and elsewhere.  But then on Friday it was deemed okay, during recess.  To appease the whining kids who, rarely considering gum before, now wanted it passionately?

So of course certain kids, including my friends and I, fetishized gum day into an orgy of maximum maceration.  If the diary is evidence of anything, it is of the extremity of our fetish.  Every Friday is an entry in which this polite hedonist that was once me either laments that he forgot to buy gum and vows to remember to do so next time, or declares triumphantly that it is gum day and (behold!) he has gum.  For something so fervently desired, it is incredible how often he forgot to buy gum.  Was he hiding something?  Was there some embarrassing circumstance that prevented him from buying gum that he didn't want to divulge?

When he wasn't registering the two states of remembered (having) and forgotten (not having) he cataloged the amounts and types of gum that he got or planned to get.  Sometimes he even wrote their prices, included in neat little tables:

.25 | 1 strawbery 10pack
.50 | 2 burst- sour
.50 | 2 bursts strvmbary
.25 | 1 other

totel $1.50

Imagine chewing this much gum in one day.  Keep in mind that even on gum day, it could only be chewed on recesses.  I don't think I actually remember doing this, but I imagine I must have been stuffing my mouth with gum as fast as possible, spitting each piece out when the sweet flavor just barely began to fade.

How can this child seem so happy, so uncomplicated?  Is it merely (I hope) by virtue of his limited knowledge of language?  I would say that he seems contented, but no, each record of satisfaction is immediately followed by the anticipation of another pleasure.  This might mean that he is "happy," in that he doesn't appear to dwell on his fleeting grasp of pleasure.  Because he cannot experience and write about his pleasure at the same time, the diary is always at a remove in time from what is posited as the presence of what he wants.  In an oddly melodramatic entry, he puts the anticipatory part of this equation rather cogently:

february 23 9:19 AM. today I forgot to bring money for gum day I hope to go shopping today because I need gum, by tomorow morning!  All I can do is hope.

They insisted that she be rained to earn a living.

It's a library book, yet for three pages it is fouled by underlining in red ink.  Attempting to make sense of the marks, it at first seems to me that the underliner was pointing out typos.  Maybe he or she even had a kind of helpful purpose in mind: to tell future readers with red ink "look, this word isn't what it's supposed to be!"  The obvious typo is "processions" where "professions" should be.  Not just typos, but grammatical errors are underlined: "has" where "have" should be, for instance.  The oddest word underlined is "rained" in this sentence: "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living."  What word ought that to be?  This and the rest I can't make sense out of, exactly.  "On" in "whirling on her mind": should it properly be "in," or something?  This just seems like nitpicking.  And finally there's "pennant."I don't know what's wrong with it.  Is it spelled wrong?  The "pennant" in the next paragraph isn't underlined.  But then, by that page the underliner seems to have given up.  Too many errors to correct.  The book of course must be full of them.

It does leave me rather haunted.  What am I reading?  What else, unaided by red ink, is "wrong"?  But it's a mild haunting, as the underlined errors are not particularly grave, and don't much threaten the coherence of the novel's narrative.  "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living" does indeed sound like nonsense, but I move on.  It doesn't matter really; the sentence may as well say "[they] insisted that she earn a living."  It is interesting, though, to imagine how many other "rained"s we elide to read, whether they're words, phrases, sentences, themes, characters, or anything else that we ignore.

That sort of elision of unresolved words in order concatenate a coherent narrative, argument, or whatever is the semantic analogue of what depressives often become stuck on.  Unconvinced by the signified, someone depressed revisits the signifier over and over.    Or at least that's how Julia Kristeva has it.  ("Concatenate" is her phraseology in Black Sun).  When this position is taken up not regarding a forgettably nonsensical word in a novel, but regarding the most glaring failures of signifying apparatuses (death being the quintessential example and metaphor here), it raises some important questions.  What happens to the unsignifyable?  How can they be held onto and how can they be dropped?  Neither seems quite possible.  However felicitously signified, they remain not quite entirely captured.  However seamlessly elided, they continue to haunt.  However rigorously maintained as a pure void, this too is a symbol.  If not, what is there maintained?  And finally, this is not a special category; no signifier is strictly signifyable--thus the distinction.  Don't think about it too much.