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r e m e m b r a n c e parrot comforts There are many species of sadness, each with its own particular weight and shadow —the gloom of homesickness, the maudlin tears of self-pity, the distress of grief or empathy with another’s loss—each shifting the weight of sadness toward a place or person that once was but is no longer, or, more abstractly, toward what might have been. But while sadness for a failed dream is bitter, sadness is most acutely linked with the real physical loss of a person or thing that has passed forever from view. With this loss comes remembrance, and with remembrance a longing for the departed and, in its absence, a sentimental yearning for a token, an object, something that can be felt and touched: a material souvenir of what is no longer but lingers everlastingly in memory.“After an emotional catastrophe,”Susan Pearce notes,“it is always the sight of a scarf which the absent lover used to wear which enables us to enter more profoundly into our sense of loss, showing ourselves to ourselves in ways which nothing else can do.”1 Objects of remembrance are private things filled with a personal and at times incommunicable significance. 7 Loulou was established on a part of the chimney-piece which jutted into the room. Every morning, on waking, she saw him in the light of dawn, and recalled the days that were gone and insignificant events down to their smallest details, without grief, full of tranquillity. —gustave flaubert,“Un coeur simple” (1877) PSU_Poliquin_Text.indd 199 4/20/12 12:21 PM | the breathless zoo 200 Strangely, objects of remembrance give us the freedom to forget. They allow us to move on in life, to do other things, to put certain memories out of mind for a while. Hidden in boxes, squirreled away in drawers, these memory-laden objects are always ready to be retrieved, fondled, and re-remembered, and then to be put out of sight again. Such objects are an individual’s possessions, not in the way that books, toasters, and shoes are possessions but rather like prosthetic limbs: they are ours,an extension of our individual self; they fit into a hole that has been left by loss while embodying the very evidence of that loss. In this way, souvenirs of loss bring the past into the present. They make time personal and intimate. A souvenir that belonged to a departed loved one is powerful, but a souvenir that once was a beloved is potentially intoxicating. How intoxicating? That explanation is best left to Gustave Flaubert and his short, sad tale “Un coeur simple,” published in 1877. Flaubert’s tale recounts the series of deaths and departures that compose the life of a simple housemaid named Félicité. Her father dies, then her mother, and the sisters are dispersed. She is beaten by a farmer who let her keep cows in his fields. Her fiancé is harsh and deceitful and leaves her heartbroken. She begins life again as a servant for Madame Aubain and her two children, Virginia and Paul, whom she serves for half a century with the unswerving devotion of a nun.But one by one they all leave her—her long-lost nephew, the children, an old man with cancer living in a pigsty. They all forget her or die, even Loulou, her beloved parrot. But Loulou Félicité has stuffed. Jauntily posed with one foot in the air and a gilded nut in his beak, Loulou becomes more than just the stuffed shell of Félicité’s beloved bird. Over the years Félicité transforms her little attic room at the top of Madame Aubain’s house into a shrine cluttered with religious icons and relics of all her departed loves: rosaries, holy virgins, a holy water basin made out of a coconut, a picture of the Holy Ghost with flaming red wings, Virginia’s little plush hat, artificial flowers, a box of shells from her nephew. Loulou, her only real treasure, is the central figure. The difference between religious objects and objects of remembrance blurs, and together these mementos provoke a sad yet rapturous passion in the housemaid. She begins to suspect that the Holy Ghost—the“Giver of Tongues”—was really a parrot, not the dove that is conventionally represented. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and the Holy Ghost talk; doves only coo.2 And when Madame Aubain dies...

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