When A Memory Explodes With New Meaning

Memories from the muck at La Brea Tar Pits.

There’s a thing that happens as I grow older, where an old memory emerges into new meaning. Like a bubble in a tar pit, it expands into my awareness and then bursts with an epiphany. For example, I remember the tone of a comment my aunt made about an uncle, “Guess who’s here?” As I look back, I realize that she hated him. We were on the beach at Lake Michigan on a perfect, breezy afternoon. There was little remarkable about the day, but that memory persisted. Perhaps because on some level I knew that more was going on than I could fully understand.

This recontextualization of memory and the finding of new meaning is often the subject of profound art. In the deeply moving film Aftersun, we see the memories of an adult woman. She recalls the summer she spent as a teen with her father at a beach resort. The scenes depict unspoken tenderness between the father and daughter, and, over time, we realize that what she recalled as a blissful summer was perhaps a period of incredible anguish for her father. This is conveyed so subtly that her discovery becomes our own to moving effect.

In “Fire’s Reflection,” the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke explores how a seemingly random memory of light playing on polished furniture becomes foundational.

Fire's Reflection

Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection

on some piece of gleaming furniture

that the child remembers so much later

like a revelation.

And if in his later life, one day

wounds him like so many others,

it's because he mistook some risk

or other for a promise.

Let's not forget the music, either,

that soon had hauled him

toward absence complicated

by an overflowing heart…

The way that Rilke describes the image of the fire, a reflection within a reflection, that becomes a revelation and ends with an overflowing heart, captures the journey of these types of memories perfectly. They are innocuous artifacts of childhood, until, suddenly, we become aware enough to see them for what they are. Nothing in the world changed except something within our own awareness.

And that change of awareness — that re-contextualization of a moment in time — can move us to laugh or cry, or it can incite us to change our lives. This window into the mystery of consciousness, a glimpse of the eternal, is profound. Nothing in the material world has changed. But our perception of it changed, and then we changed, and then we changed the world in some material way as a result — even if only to produce a tear that leaves a salty trail on our cheek.

In her beautiful novel, “Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson, another example of this memory-mining takes place. The narrator reflects on a moment in his life when his father handed him a biscuit in the rain as a congregation dismantled a burnt-down church.

My father brought me some biscuit that had soot on it from his hands. 'Never mind,' he said, 'there’s nothing cleaner than ash.' But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it’s rather forgotten now.

'Strange are the uses of adversity.' That’s a fact. When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing 'The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.

I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me. I can’t tell myself what it has meant to me. But I know how many things it put altogether beyond question, for me.

I find myself returning to this passage again and again. It so beautifully braids together the meaning of communion, memory, and the great mystery.

The deep melancholy, it seems to me, that runs through the film, the poem, and the novel, is that a new awareness of the gulf that separates us all arises even as a deeper connection is created within the insight. They are a memory of a moment when the rememberer himself was not yet aware of what was taking place. They are the clicking into place, after the fact, of elements that no longer exist anywhere but within our minds. Perhaps life is a constant piecing together of a puzzle that we threw out a decade ago. Meaning and futility are intertwined, but the futility gives the memory more meaning.

Another memory of mine was hearing my mother talk about a book she’d read about how to truly appreciate art. The instructions were to sit before a painting for an hour and not move, just examine the piece for an hour. My mother tried this and was reporting to a friend how fruitful she found the practice. I was an antsy child, and I remember finding the concept horrifying. I was terrified that my mom would make me try something like that. I pictured myself squirming on a hard marble bench in front of some painting that I could not understand. It was just a random snatch of conversation at the time, seemingly meaningless.

But now I cherish that memory. It says so much about my mother. Her eagerness to engage with art, no matter what it demanded of her. Her openness to other expressions. Her willingness to explore ideas. There weren’t many single mothers in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the ‘80s who were willing to spend a precious hour in front of a work of art.

That’s what I didn’t get back then. What I saw as a looming, and punishing, sentence in a museum was an invitation to live in this world with my thoughts and feelings with no other distraction than a work of art labored over by another human who had something to share about their humanness. I see it now, in my mind. I hear my mother’s voice, younger then, younger than I am now.

My mother, like the father in Aftersun, was going through a difficult time then. Her troubles affected me, and how they affected me was my primary concern for many years. But getting older means seeing how she was affected, what she was experiencing. I see now that what I felt was wind in a storm that raged within her. That’s how storms work. Things come together in a certain way until the blue skies are crowded out by lightning and spinning winds and funnel clouds.

That moment my mother talked about art is a painting that lives in my mind, a brushstroke among many in the portrait of my soul that is still a work in progress. That was our communion, one among many. And like any communion, God was there. There in the art. There in the artist. There in my impatience. There in my mother’s voice.

So here is what I want to ask you to do, my friends. These snapshots of memory that become oil paintings of meaning —they are being made all the time. Must they always be accidents or storms? I don’t think so. I think we can make them now. I think we can sit with someone, commune together, whatever that means to you, feel the poetry of the moment, and vow to remember. Place that painting of the moment into the gallery of your mind. Allow the meaning to change over time. Sit in front if it in the museum of your memories, for an hour if you like, and then wait until one day it reveals itself to you anew.