poemranker ::The Forgetting by Dovina

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Free verse № 136195

The Forgetting

by Dovina

Member since 2004 · Posted 2 Jan 2006 · 37 comments

He stooped to smell a rose, the same he’d smelled all morning. Inner child not inner any more, he tasted everything new— delicious oblivion. Eternal pasteless now.

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37 comments

[8] lmp 3-Jan-06/1:58 PM Reply
i like the image, and the hint of living time in reverse (perhaps?). I am confounded however, by the last line; is "pasteless" a typo? or maybe this is a fanciful land where the collage of the child smelling a rose comes to life and "unpastes" himself...
quaint and lovely nonetheless, it stimulates conjecture.
[n/a] Dovina › lmp 3-Jan-06/2:54 PM Reply
I cannot claim typoness for pasteless, but must revert to someotherness, which zodiac will explain to you. Actually, your child unpasting his thoughts from the world is a good definition.
[8] ALChemy 3-Jan-06/2:12 PM Reply
What is with you people just making up words whenever it suits you. At least put a footnote to tell us what the heck it means. Actually I think "Eternal paste-tounge now." would have been a lot cuter.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 3-Jan-06/2:53 PM Reply
What does “paste-tounge” mean, oh thou of nondictionaryless words?
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/6:27 AM Reply
Paste-tounge is the phenomonon when you eat paste and you don't wash it down with a hardy glass of paint water and a film of paste dries on your tounge.
Or it's when you're simply speachless. When you're stuck for words.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/1:21 PM Reply
Since I'm female and do not have a tounge, "you" is hardly the right pronoun. You might as well tell me how paste feels on a penis.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:02 PM Reply
Whoops! Damn dylexia. "Tongue" I mean. What's with the penis talk?
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/3:06 PM Reply
You can't be serious, spelling it that way three times in a row? You were puloling my . . .er, ah .. .leg.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:09 PM Reply
I really am dyslexic you Jerk.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/3:11 PM Reply
I'm sorry then. Were you really serious about spelling tongue as "tounge" several times running?
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:24 PM Reply
Some words just never look right to me unless I spell them wrong.
"their" is another one. I always want to spell it as "thier". It's not that I see words backwords or jumbled anymore. I just sometimes remember them mixed up. So reading isn't hard for me although it's probably a little slower but writing is a bit harder. One of the reasons I started writing poetry was for practice.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/3:51 PM Reply
And a vivid imagination comes with the territory, I see. Enviable in a way.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/6:11 PM Reply
But when your imagination exceeds your ability it can be a depressing. Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker" is about that.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 5-Jan-06/6:20 AM Reply
I think it's easier to improve ability than to improve imagination.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/6:30 AM Reply
By the way. I wrote a poem full of dictionaryless words.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/1:22 PM Reply
It's always the worst offenders who complain the most about the same offense in others.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:04 PM Reply
I was offended by your penis comment. I guess that makes me the worst sexual offender by your logic.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/3:08 PM Reply
To say you were offended is illgical, given history as it is.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:27 PM Reply
I've already admitted that I'm a bit of a contradiction. That's my conundrum.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 4-Jan-06/3:49 PM Reply
Only zodiac and dark angel have no contradictions.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/6:17 PM Reply
Personally I embrace contradictions. It's helps you get along with people better.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 4-Jan-06/3:07 PM Reply
Besides, mine was intended to sound like gibberish.
[8] lmp › ALChemy 3-Jan-06/3:01 PM Reply
poets, i suppose, exercising their license?
[7] LilMsLadyPoet › lmp 3-Jan-06/8:39 PM Reply
Other than the word pasteless, I like it. In fact it would be good even if you dropped the last line. I would think it a blessing to savor as new the smell of a rose, rediscovering things that delight the senses, and forget the pain and worry of just a moment ago. It is hard, but some good and joy comes from it as well.
Isn't it a form of pastel? Without pastels? without color?
Unable to paste? without paste?
LOL....Microsoft Word and my standard dictionary does not have such a word as pasteless.
[n/a] Dovina › LilMsLadyPoet 4-Jan-06/1:28 PM Reply
Nor does mine. I was trying to portray the feeling of having forgotten all the connections that “paste” each new sensation to the known world. As he lost that ability, everything seems new and “unpasted.” But I agree that the last line may be over-the-top, and could be scratched.
[n/a] INTRANSIT 5-Jan-06/7:20 AM Reply
Congrats on Divorcing Tennessee! Sorry I still don't know what to think of this one.
[n/a] zodiac 5-Jan-06/9:26 AM Reply
David Shenk, who is comfortably under fifty, makes the case in "The Forgetting" that a cure for senile dementia might not be an unmitigated blessing. He notes, for example, that one striking peculiarity of the disease is that its sufferers often suffer less and less as it progresses. Caring for an Alzheimer's patient is gruellingly repetitious precisely because the patient himself has lost the cerebral equipment to experience anything as a repetition. Shenk quotes patients who speak of "something delicious in oblivion" and who report an enhancement of their sensory pleasures as they come to dwell in an eternal, pastless Now. If your short-term memory is shot, you don't remember, as you stoop to smell a rose, that you've been stooping to smell the same rose all morning.

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/010910fa_FACT1
[8] ALChemy › zodiac 5-Jan-06/9:53 AM Reply
Sometimes man, you just plain old scare me.
[n/a] zodiac › zodiac 5-Jan-06/10:00 AM Reply
ZODIAC: ***PLAGIARY ALERT***

Dovina: Not so. I changed pastless to pasteless. It's an allusion.

ZODIAC: The title, central image, and 95% of the words aren't yours.

DOVINA: I'm an illusion.

ZODIAC: I don't have time for this. You've been warned. Again.
[n/a] Dovina › zodiac 5-Jan-06/10:51 AM Reply
I did not know about that book. Nothing is copied.
[n/a] zodiac › Dovina 5-Jan-06/11:00 AM Reply
I don't want to argue about it; it's just that I find that impossible to believe. Look, I can practically write your poem from article quotes:

"The Forgetting"

"you stoop to smell a rose,"
"the same rose" "that you've been stooping to smell" "all morning" ...
"delicious in oblivion"
"eternal, pastless Now"

No, "he tasted everything new" isn't in the article. But it's not grammatical either. Take credit for it if you like.

Look, I'm really, really, REALLY not looking to give you a hard time. The only reason I know about the article is that I was looking up a poem I remembered with the narrator stooping to smell a rose (Edmund Waller, maybe?) to congratulate you on referencing it. Let's let the readers decide for themselves. I'd personally like to believe you read New Yorker, The Guardian, or obscure neurology texts.
[n/a] Dovina › zodiac 5-Jan-06/11:01 AM Reply
I did not know about that book. Nothing is copied.
[n/a] zodiac › Dovina 5-Jan-06/11:16 AM Reply
That's fine. Whatever.
[n/a] Dovina › zodiac 5-Jan-06/1:30 PM Reply
I read “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen a couple of years ago, the same author who wrote “My Father’s Brain” which you cited and in which he quotes David Shenk. “The Corrections” deals with old age issues and may contain some of the same language David Shenk used. I’d have to go through it again to know. What I do know is that phrases stick in my head and tend to come out in my writing even if I read them years before. Of course, you always assume the worst and call it the most logical.
[n/a] zodiac › Dovina 5-Jan-06/5:10 PM Reply
Kindly do not assume what I do or don't assume.

If you read the aboveposted text years ago, forgot it, and then rewrote it, that's still plagiarism, albeit obviously accidental plagiarism. There are myriad cases of similar things happening.

If you've somehow independently written this without ANY prior experience with the text, I'm sorry I said you were a plagiarist. For what that's worth. In either event, it would obviously still be a good idea, if not your responsibility, to rewrite or withdraw your version.

Yes, the fact that you've based your poem on a wordplay on a not-exactly-familiar phrase, "eternal pastless now", made me think you were thinking of some original phrase or text you knew. I cannot see how you'd think "eternal pasteless now" was clever or worthwhile otherwise.

Again, I'm sorry about this whole thing. I didn't wake up this beautiful snowy Alaska morning thinking I was going to be mean to you. I'd like to start being nice to you now, so maybe it's best we let this whole thing go for today.
[6] Beyond_Dreams 7-Jan-06/4:03 AM Reply
My grandmother had Alzheimer's, I wish it was as simple as you portrait it here.
[7] amanda_dcosta 9-Jan-06/3:40 AM Reply
No offence, but somehow, something's missing. The poem's good, but I don't feel the punch as much as I do in some poems.