I’m fascinated by memory. If I write a novel, as one day I hope to do, memory will be a major theme.
But , really, what’s the purpose of memories? Of course, we all need to have them to understand who we are and what we’re doing etc, etc. Lots of our memories relate to important events in our lives that have shaped us as people. O.k, I get that.
I’m talking about all that other stuff that’s floating around in there. Smell or taste memories that can shoot you ten years into the past in a heartbeat. Or incredibly vivid memories of occassions when nothing very important happened, you just felt happy, or sad, or whatever. My memorey banks are crowded up with hundreds, or possibly thousands of these kinds or memories.
For example:
One lazy Sunday afternoon in summer a few years ago, I aquired a big orange balloon. How is boring and not relevant, but perhaps it is relevant that orange is my favourite colour. Anyway, I took it home to my little ground floor flat, and me and my b.f. just hung out there, with the balloon in the middle of the room. All of a sudden, the sky outside darkened, and a sudden thunder, lightening and heavy rain shower whipped up outside. We had all the windows open beacuse it was hot before the storm, and it allowed this cool breeze to suddenly gush into the room.
I have really vivid recollections of this day, when all the leafy greenery outside was being bathed in rain after a long hot dry spell, under a darkened and lightening flecked sky, and meanwhile we were all cosy inside our little flat which felt all warm and safe, especially with this huge orange balloon just radiating warmth in the centre of the room.
So, that’s my memory- and that really is all. It has no special significance, nothing of any grat importance happened, and yet I can close my eyes and picture the scene with absolute clarity, and doing so gives me this great feeling of happiness.
so, what’s that all about???
and do you have any similar meaningless but important memories??
here’s one interesting thought on the subject to get us started, from the Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami (given in a recent interview)
I have no sense of smell left. I lost it maybe ten years ago (don’t know why.) And by no sense of smell, I mean TOTAL loss, not the slightest hint of smell. Anyways, like I’ve heard about people who lose limbs and still think they feel them, years later, I sometimes get a smell in my head. My brain must be working overtime. Some of the more common “smells” I get are charcaol/burny, soap, sweat (yuck!) and this disgustingly sweet smell. They last for days sometimes.
A few years ago I suddenly got this “smell” of a house my aunt and uncle lived in, when I was young. Kind of a musty smell, but not unpleasant. I wouldn’t have even remembered this smell, or even remembered that thier house had a particular smell, but I was instantly transported back to my childhood and all the good times my sisters and cousins and I had there.
Smells are, indeed, the portals to memory. I’ve had a few olfactory reminisciences of hallucinatory clarity, and they’ve always been accompanied by strong memories of the places they’re attached to.
One in particular was a strong smell of Missouri on a humid summer evening. I lived in Missouri for seven years, but have not been back there since I moved away five years ago. But I still smelled overripe foliage and air heavy and enveloping with humidity, the ostention of magnolia perfume and the sweetness of thick, velvety earth. In my mind’s eye, I saw a gloaming sky moving from deep blue-black in the east to lavender and bloody red in the west. I saw the forest outside my former home as thick and impenetrable as the great forests of Mideval Europe, with trees standing tall and impassive with rich crowns of leaves that blocked the sky.
All of that flooded back in an instant. I did not specifically search for that moment in time. It simply came to me as a sudden deluge, a summer shower of recollection. It isn’t specific to any day, it’s simply a feeling for a whole time in my life.
A lot of times music can instantly take me back to the past. I’ll listen to a song that I listened to a lot at some point in time and I’ll suddenly feel like I’m back then, or at least be filled with a certain “feeling” of being back then, well it’s hard to explain. But being so close to the past like that makes me strangely happy, even if that time wasn’t a particularly happy time.