Memoir as Still Life

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I must confess that the end of the semester has prompted me to pull on my hip waders and go stomping through the melancholy marshes of “never-again-land.” Walking out of the incredibly prosaic computer building where my multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests would be machine-scored, I sighed “Well, I’ll never do that again.”  Not exactly a momentous experiential loss. But as I wander about campus in something of a “pre-phased-retirement-funk,” wondering if or when I might pass this way again, a more interesting thought came to mind: memory as a series of still lifes.

You see it occurred to me that I really wasn’t worried about missing the various venues. They are shifting weekly as the campus and its immediate environs are caught in a throes of compulsive construction. Like Rome, new structures rise on the bones of ancient architectural acquaintances. That is when I realized I wouldn’t really miss the old buildings all that much. Rather, I was feeling blue about the people who had walked these paths with me, almost all of whom, via the vagaries of time and life, were now absent. Having pinned down the source of my discontent, I now make a conscious effort to greet their shades with a smile, and a chuckle of shared memories.  

Less this reflection grow too, too, maudlin, let me hasten to point out that relatively few of these dear departed are dead. A university campus, despite the seemingly solid ivy and towers, is a transient world.  Students graduate and move on with their lives, colleagues answer the call of other opportunities, some have preceded me into retirement, friends slide into the maze of life and too often become little more than a cryptic sig on a forwarded email or a shared picture on the black mirrors of the 21st century.

Yet some of those memories are the defining moments of my life, and I am becoming more and more attached to the idea of something akin to a memory palace of my life as lived up to this place and time. Building a "memory palace," by the way, is something at which I am a colossal failure. I just can’t get past the intimidating notion of creating imaginary rooms in an imaginary house into which I further imagine placing things that will remind me of now third or fourth order things that I am prone to forget. Really, now. How is that rational?  So my attempts at those memory palaces quickly degrade to funhouse halls of mirrors. 

Perhaps instead, I should say a memory "gallery." A gallery in which particular rooms are dedicated to specific eras or individuals. And on the walls are painted still lifes of the defining moments from that slice of my life. “And why paintings?” You ask. “Why not photographs?” For the same reason that I prefer memoirs to biographies. Biographies attempt to capture the “reality” of a life and are judged by historical accuracy. Memoirs seek to capture the distilled essence of lives lived, unfettered by the unflattering glare of the “data” that actual photographs may shoulder into the depiction of a magic moment.

An analogy:  It may have been around the same time that my buddy Dan and I put on the Big Rock Show, or it may have been several years later, but at some point in our youth “rock tumblers” had their moment in the commercial sun. You bought a “rock polishing kit” that consisted of a small bag of ordinary looking rocks about the size of the first joint of your little finger, a bag of polishing grit, a “tumbler” container - a bit shorter and fatter than a soup can - and a small motor-driven device that would keep the container rolling over in place like a hamster exercise wheel. You unscrewed the top of the container, dumped in the rocks, the grit, and some water, and screwed the lid back on. You then put the container onto the tumbling device, plugged it in and turned it on, causing the container, rocks, water and grit to tumble over and over and over. And you left it alone for a few weeks. Well, what usually happened was when, after checking the rocks hourly for a couple of days and seeing no change, you just forgot about it and went off in pursuit of some more immediate gratification - riding bikes, playing backyard football or something. 

A few weeks later, usually on a rainy afternoon when there was nothing else to do, you came upon your rock polisher chugging away in a corner of the garage. You turned it off, opened it up, and rinsed the grit off the now magically transformed rocks. Where once had been nondescript, dull stones, were gleaming, smooth, dazzling fragments of the history of the planet. That is fairly accurate description of how the tumbling grit of life and experience turn memory into memoir — turn a photograph into a still life.

You see, without practice, perhaps instruction, and specific compositional intent, most photographs doggedly record the dull bag of rocks of our lives. And the Internet is the greatest rock collector ever conceived. We post over a billion rocks, er, pictures to it everyday. So still life paintings, not photographs, hang in my memory gallery.

Which brings me, more or less directly, to my recurring frustration with my inability to draw or paint those still lifes that I can see so clearly in my head. We look at Picasso’s later works, and assert “I could do that!” while naively forgetting  that in his early years the man did classical realism with the best of them. I look at my own work and realize that deep behind a work that appears to be the result of simplistic doodle done in a faculty meeting, the more discerning viewer can see within those subtle strokes the echoes of another similarly simplistic doodle actually executed over the course of two faculty meetings! But, I’m really OK with that. I realize that while some drawing and painting can be taught, the truly gifted are, well, gifted. And I am pretty much over the fact that I was daydreaming the day that those particular abilities were handed out.

So I continue to paint those still lifes in my mind, and lovingly hang them in my memory gallery. There is no admission charge, but sadly, I am the only patron allowed to view the art. I try to make up for that obvious flaw by crafting the catalogue descriptions which often end up here, hanging on a written Wall. 

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