Sense Memory:
Of Corals and Cows
I really like traveling through the Alps. For a Californian, this can be a burdensome affection: Not only are alp-associated countries expensive, but the thirteen hour flight to Switzerland or Austria is rough on both budget and butt.
And yet I keep going back. Spending a small fortune every couple of years to amble along some mountain’s shoulder, to stare at some dramatic vista. To eat cheese.
Why?
And yet I keep going back. Spending a small fortune every couple of years to amble along some mountain’s shoulder, to stare at some dramatic vista. To eat cheese.
Why?
It’s a good question. Mountains, vistas, cheese -- these things all exist closer to (my) home, and in good quantity, enjoyable with far less effort.
Sonoma, California -- Mountains, vistas, and (not depicted) cheese.
Of course there are plenty of good, interesting reasons. There have been times in my life when I sought to be quelled and overwhelmed by immensity, to experience the Sublime so directly that there’s no escaping it. Standing beneath the weight of a wall of granite that fills half your visual field stills all those restless selves.
But there are other reasons. There is, for example, this:
And these:
All of which lend significance to this:
Flicking through a phone full of photos from my last trip, I realized that the chances of my liking a picture would invariably rise the more that photo resembled this:
Really? All my ponderings and philosophizing, and I’m really just looking for a scene that can fit some template set out by a cheese label? Sheesh.
I’m not unique in this, of course. Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin and John Berger all wrote eloquently about how an image can reorganize our perceptions. Walker Percy wrote an astute and rather sad essay (“The Loss of the Creature”) noting the ways that our visual expectations of a scene (Yosemite, the Grand Canyon), primed by postcards or movies or whatever, mean that we’ll never be able to experience that landscape in a direct, unmediated way. It’ll always be filtered through our own preconceptions – and usually come up lacking.
Clouds will obscure the Matterhorn, no matter how much you’ve spent on your visit or how carefully you’ve tracked the weather.
Clouds will obscure the Matterhorn, no matter how much you’ve spent on your visit or how carefully you’ve tracked the weather.
But those cheese labels: they suggest something else operating here, as well. Proust had his madeline, and I – well, I have my cheese labels.
At some point in my capacious youth I must’ve set eyes on one of these. It’s quite likely; my father’s homesickness for Europe was primarily culinary, and so one of our periodic trips to some German deli here in the Bay Area was a big deal for us kids. And for our juvenile tastes, a foil-wrapped triangle of some creamed German cheese was exotic and delicious – nearly as good as the then-rare Haribo gummi bears that made such occasions magical.
And all those sensuous delights – the smell of the Gummi bears, the taste of the cheese – somehow got snagged on the tiny alpine scene depicted on the label of the cheese-triangle. An alp, a green field, a cow. Blue sky and white glacier.
And over time, other associated images and feelings, experiences and ideas, accrete over that snag.
At some point in my capacious youth I must’ve set eyes on one of these. It’s quite likely; my father’s homesickness for Europe was primarily culinary, and so one of our periodic trips to some German deli here in the Bay Area was a big deal for us kids. And for our juvenile tastes, a foil-wrapped triangle of some creamed German cheese was exotic and delicious – nearly as good as the then-rare Haribo gummi bears that made such occasions magical.
And all those sensuous delights – the smell of the Gummi bears, the taste of the cheese – somehow got snagged on the tiny alpine scene depicted on the label of the cheese-triangle. An alp, a green field, a cow. Blue sky and white glacier.
And over time, other associated images and feelings, experiences and ideas, accrete over that snag.
- A whisp of familiarity when first watching The Sound of Music as a kid, sandwiched between my parents on the couch.
- A trip up a summer skilift as a teen exchange student, feet dangling over forests below.
- As a young man, trying to decide whether to stay in Heidelberg with my girlfriend, a solo hitchhiking trip into the Bernese Oberland.
- A dark night, on the balcony of some hostel facing the immense verticality of a mountain wall: a star-blotting blackness that was felt, not seen.
- A trip up to the top of the Zugspitze with my small son, to glimpse the shrinking glacier and dazzle at the horizon, with peaks like whitecaps on a mountain sea.
The view from the Zugspitze
Each time a memory is revisited, it changes. It is encrusted in a new layer of context, framed by a new perspective. Over time, the most innocuous of sensory experiences – the madeline, the cheese labels, a momentary view of an old love’s ear – accumulate layers of new life. And over time, entire reefs of coral-palaces can be built up, shimmering there, just below the surface.
Here’s a poem I drafted at some department meeting, where boredom and enforced stillness and a single vivid recalled image provoked this:
There is an ocean
With unmeasured depths
And shores dimly known
And in it I have swum,
and on occasion,
Having drawn a deep breath,
I have dived beneath its sun-ensilvered surface
Where lies a kingdom of coral,
delicate mountains of calcite lace
With bright flashing shards that blink
amongst tines and towers
And vast dim shadowy shapes,
pushing languidly past the edges
of water-thickened vision
Since over ages, a slow chaos accretes
Around some originary ancestor
Long dead, its being crushed
By the weight of what it has become --
The substance of the sea itself,
Belonging to this and some other age
And it draws my breath, which I gratefully give.
And I have, I admit, taken from that place
A fragment of shell, minute eruption of coral
And have held it up, later, examining
Such finely wrought convolutions of self upon self
Sharp-edged, so that when clutched in my palm
The flesh opens eagerly:
The fineness of shell marks the hardness of bone
The salt of the sea and the iron of blood.
So this morning I awoke,
Wet still, gasping on sand
This fragment embedded
In my red-welling hand:
Canal Street, some shop.
A smile,
Glimpsed sidelong
Past that ear
Emerging,
as it often did,
From between two
golden drapes of hair
With unmeasured depths
And shores dimly known
And in it I have swum,
and on occasion,
Having drawn a deep breath,
I have dived beneath its sun-ensilvered surface
Where lies a kingdom of coral,
delicate mountains of calcite lace
With bright flashing shards that blink
amongst tines and towers
And vast dim shadowy shapes,
pushing languidly past the edges
of water-thickened vision
Since over ages, a slow chaos accretes
Around some originary ancestor
Long dead, its being crushed
By the weight of what it has become --
The substance of the sea itself,
Belonging to this and some other age
And it draws my breath, which I gratefully give.
And I have, I admit, taken from that place
A fragment of shell, minute eruption of coral
And have held it up, later, examining
Such finely wrought convolutions of self upon self
Sharp-edged, so that when clutched in my palm
The flesh opens eagerly:
The fineness of shell marks the hardness of bone
The salt of the sea and the iron of blood.
So this morning I awoke,
Wet still, gasping on sand
This fragment embedded
In my red-welling hand:
Canal Street, some shop.
A smile,
Glimpsed sidelong
Past that ear
Emerging,
as it often did,
From between two
golden drapes of hair
Some memories remain, even after they have been forgotten. Or maybe they’re the memory of a memory. A lifetime passes, seas rise, and an ocean of experience engulfs the past. And one fragrance, one taste or glimpse of an image can catch me up as I drift around on the surface of my life. And I can follow that anchor-line down deep into the past.