LIKE PEOPLE WHO ARE AFRAID TO GO TO SLEEP

Throughout My Dinner with Andre you doze on and off, providing rest to an upper-back muscle strained and inflamed from cycling and stupidity.

You awaken to various memories.

Andre relays many of his recollections of doing experimental theater with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland. Immediately you recall how you do not like theater, do not believe an interest in theater is at all something you need. That understanding is always accompanied by the memory of falling asleep during the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet in 2001. Then, for whatever reason, you recall your cycling route past the Teatr Groteska in Kraków – which has nothing to do with Grotowski, in fact, as it is a puppet theater for children – on your way to class to study Czechoslovakian architecture (e.g., Zlín) and Tadeusz Kantor’s stage sets.

And you fall asleep for a little while.

When you wake up, Andre relates a memory of being in the Polish forest and sobbing in a woman’s arms during an acting exercise with Grotowski’s group. You remember all the walks and bike rides with M in the woods around Borek Wielki: cutting through the small village cemetery and into the birches; the new highway to Rzeszów that runs right through the further woods and fields; the church nearby tolling its bleak bells and that time you stumbled into a funeral procession upon exiting the woods; the small, random, disturbing piles of garbage next to some of the paths; passing village residents leading horses to the fields or pushing 40 year-old bicycles down the dirt road, how you would say good day and they would just stare blankly, unreplying. You think: this is what the Polish forests do to people.

Return to the doze.

You wake up and as Andre says “we’re all bored now,” you hear Frank O’Hara’s words: “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” You remember reading Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Hara when you were around 13 years-old, which you had chosen randomly as you developed an interest in poetry. You remember reading that sitting next to Preston in his mother’s car as she drove you all to the Ubatuba beach.

Andre discusses how people talk about leaving New York and never do. A recent memory is accessed of hearing Andre’s spiel, in which living in New York is compared to feeling like you have built your own prison, on a Beats in Space radio set (you forget which one) and emailing A about it. Virtually every friend you have ever had in New York has talked to you about leaving, but they never do. You recall that friends who live in Ohio never talk about leaving.

Andre goes on to cite various theories based around “islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age.”At this no memories at all come to the fore, and at best your reaction is ambivalent.

Andre speaks again of his memories of the Polish forests and of trying to communicate without words. And this is what Poland does to you: makes you want to communicate without and outside language, inhabit sullen Slavic silences in order to hear the forgottenness wafting through the eastern woods, to pay attention to the memories that cannot be voiced, cannot even be said good day to.

You drift off again.

When you wake up, Andre’s talk has turned to oblivion: “We’re afraid to stay in that place of forgetting, because that again is close to death – like people who are afraid to go to sleep.” You think of your sleep problems, of your parents’ sleep problems, everyone’s sleep problems. Can you remember when your sleep problems developed?

Andre talks of parents, children, aging: “Where is that son?” A wave of what feels like memory comes on, but it is nothing determinate: instead, it is some emotion, it is forgetting as an emotion.

The outro music starts: Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1.” Of course you recall first hearing this in The Royal Tenenbaums and how taken aback you were by that scene in Eli Cash’s apartment. Eli Cash was played by Owen Wilson, brother of Luke Wilson, who is also in the scene soundtracked by Satie and who several people have said you resemble. You bought a CD of Satie’s music soon after this first encounter: at Paul’s CDs in Pittsburgh, that’s what you want to say, but no, it may have been at Quonset Hut in Canton or even Borders. A shared recollection is that Satie’s work has become rather trite and overused by now, but his music still moves you, breaks down your defenses. You actually prefer the “Gnossiennes,” especially the first one as it always reminds you of Henry and June, though it was actually the third “Gnossienne” that was used in that film. You remember listening to the “Gymnopédies”and “Gnossiennes” on a bus from the Kraków airport, staring out the window, how you realized the interminable compositional power at work, that those pieces sound best while moving through a familiar landscape made strange by acts of memory.

Wallace finds space and time to enter his own memories as he takes a taxi home: “There wasn’t a street, there wasn’t a building, that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind.” Can you say that about everywhere you have lived? Or perhaps the better question is: have you lived somewhere about which you cannot say that?

As Wallace looks out the cab windows, eager then stunned, he closes by mentioning his conversation with his girlfriend: “And I told her everything about my dinner with Andre.” You wonder what he told her, how carried off into his own realms of memory he would have been as the dinner conversation flickered through his mind. What more can we say about such experiences and recollections, especially when the ultimate conversation is with one’s forgetting?

The city passes, Satie plays in the background, and you suddenly realize that, in your experience – besides Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó – this is one of the best films to doze off and on to ever. After Andre ventures “where is that son?” and Wallace calls upon his memory, the dark city, the graceful shots, and the “Gymnopédie” all push you gently through a hypnapompic state out of forgetting and into memory, towards the desire to remember these ending scenes and think about them tomorrow, and finally towards the desire for more forgetting and more sleep.