[NB: There will be no picture this time because I can’t decide on anything.]

So this would seem a perfect topic for me to expound upon, and yet I’m paralyzed. Mostly because the kinds of things that we are to focus on this week are all around me all the time and I use them constantly. That is, at any one time I’m “reading” around 20 books. I use that term loosely. “Reading” = “opening up occasionally and idling glancing at a sentence, musing, then closely the book for another one.” It’s pathological and disgusting.

But I use these tiny scraps of anything to hold my place in the book. Airline tickets, receipts, index cards, tiny bits of ragged notebook paper, dry cleaner stubs, old checks, ATM statements, brochures, bills, money, napkins, and so on.

Many of these placeholders revive a moment in the past. Many of them don’t. I think what’s most interesting is how receipts for books I’ve purchased in the past are basically wormholes to the affective disposition I had at that time. This is good and bad.

For example.

My Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens has the receipt still stuck inside. The print is basically nonexistent. But I can still make out the date and place of purchase. Highland, Indiana. Winter. The money I used to buy it was a gift from a relative. I made my father stop off at a Borders before we left town. And since I was fancying myself a poet, I knew I needed more heavy-hitting poetry in my bin. The choice was easy. I had read some Yeats in my college freshmen English Lit. class. I’d get Yeats and be on my way. But the waffling ensued. I saw the Stevens. I knew he was big. I wasn’t keen on his stuff, but I knew he was hot shit. Altho, I came into the store with a jones for Yeats, I walked out with Stevens. What gives?

Here’s the thing. I don’t regret the Stevens. He’s become one of my favorite poets and a touchstone for my thoughts on language in the subsequent years. [Nevermind that the book sat on my shelf for a very long time before I even tried to open it.]

Now, back to the receipt. Levy’s meditation is interesting, but too wide in scope for me. Let’s keep the scope to a life. The materiality of the receipt is directly connected to the immateriality of the experience now dead and gone but only living in my noggin. And only when I pull that receipt out. I go back to my earlier Carl Sagan reference about how humans are the only animals that have off-shored our memory banks into other objects.

My respect for the receipt as a material thing comes to when I realize that narrative is capable of showing its hydra-head in the most scant of informative places.

Materiality offers evidence, proof. Proof of what, I’m not sure. But in this instance, it was proof that a decision was made, once, hastily, in a now defunct bookstore in northern Indiana.

Further, I find it fascinating that we go thru the trouble to PRINT material proof for the most asinine moments. Buying a donut. Checking out a library book. Paying your electric bill for the 1000th time.

And yet we neglect to print out anything for the most important decisions. First loves, death, birth, the cementing of friendships, etc. Is there something corny and insouciant about a receipt of death. A receipt of death isn’t a receipt, it’s a CERTIFICATE.

Sounds pretty trumped up to me.

As a parting thought, perhaps the printing and proof and materiality of a large-scale event would be to denigrate it somehow? I’m sure there are plenty of refutations to my idea here, and I’ll probably think of a ton as soon as I post this.

I just find it funny to imagine one young lover printing off a receipt of reciprocated love from a small electronic device kept in the side pocket.