4/6/24
I feel compelled to merge my two ongoing writing projects into a single essay at this point, because they have reached similar terrain. In the introduction to my Stendhal project, I mentioned the Marcel Proust concept of the “intermittences of the heart,” which is a physical sensation that results from tapping into a past memory. It is an out-of-body sensation that transports you back to another moment where you become aware of past feelings because you are experiencing similar feelings in the present.
Proust introduces this concept in such a beautiful way. His alter ego protagonist Marcel is a hopeless hypochondriac who always seems to be suffering from some physical malady. At this point in the story, he has something he calls “cardiac fatigue.” Both the fictional and real Marcel clearly could have used more exercise, but let’s put that aside for a moment. He’s bending over slowly to remove his boots when this feeling comes over him.
As he struggles to remove them, he feels what he calls a divine presence and starts to sob. And he suddenly feels his grandmother coming to his assistance to help him remove the boots. But what makes Marcel break down in this moment is the fact that his grandmother has been dead for a year and it is only right now, when he desires the kind of loving presence she has been in his life, when he first becomes fully aware of her absence.
Marcel says that in this moment his grandmother was:
rediscoved in a complete and involuntary memory. This reality does not exist for us until such time as it has been recreated in our minds (otherwise the men who have been involved in some titanic battle would all be great epic poets); thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself in her arms, it was only at this instant — more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings — that I had just learned she was dead.
I want to apply this moment to the scene in “Drive My Car” that I just discussed. This is Misaki’s driving test, on the surface a fairly mundane scene in the film. But we must also consider that this scene — which takes place a few years after Oto’s death — is also likely the first time that Kafuku has ridden in a car with a woman driving since the time Oto drove him home from the hospital and he told her, despite loving her dearly, how much he hated her driving.
The movie never explicitly tells us that Kafuku is experiencing an intermittence of the heart, but we can assume so by the fact that he asks Misaki to put in the “Uncle Vanya” audio tape that Oto recorded and he proceeds to argue with his dead wife angrily via his role in the play. Hearing his tone of voice, so unexpected for us, given how controlled Kafuku is on the surface, it’s clear that he’s feeling something much more profound than just being driven around by a woman he just met.
A little of a year ago, I too experienced something that felt a bit like this intermittence. I was at a work event, supporting a leader of my organization, and he had just given a very emotional speech about losing his younger brother to suicide. It was a difficult moment for him — and for many people who helped support him through it.
After the speech, I was backstage and watching another speaker on a monitor. I was alone, it was very dark. But at certain point I felt a presence and looked over and noticed that this leader was standing beside me. At this point, I reached over and patted him on the back, telling him he did a great job.
But the odd part of this experience is that I didn’t feel like I was the one giving the back pat. It felt to me like I was channeling his brother in that moment. And this odd experience left me with this profound sense of responsibility to help this leader carry on with the mental health focused program that he had just announced in the speech.
I don’t want this to seem like a mystical experience. I’ve read since then some very interesting pieces about how having a person come into your field of vision unexpectedly can touch off odd, inexplicable feelings. For now, I’m just going to chalk it up to something like Proust is explaining, that in the moment I felt something inexplicable but real.
I have referred to “Drive My Car” in several places as a ghost story, and the anecdote that Marcel shares in this scene of his epic novel has spectral elements to it as well. Where these thoughts and feelings come from doesn’t really matter than much to me. I’m more fascinated by what we do with those feelings and how people are motivated to give such moments of strong emotion lasting meaning.