There's an image crowding out the blackness on my computer's desktop. It was taken this summer in Tennessee, on a floating dock at sunset. In it, the arcing silhouette of a boy is caught in mid-flight as he dives off the dock into the lake water below. His body is all long lines and sun-burnished skin, arms stretching outwards in imprecation to meet the reflection of the sun where it lies, a molten procession of ripples in the silken lake water. The moment sits poised beautifully between land and water, day and night; it's laced with the potent expectation of impact, the clarifying moment when the boy's body hits the water and life goes on the way it always has, its picturesqueness dissipated as quickly as it formed.
Life in its sobering reality never really lives up to photographs like this. The lake water is probably heavy with silt, and the boy's dive was probably a fluke, a spasm of athletic prowess produced by merit of a hundred graceless swan dives. But it doesn't matter, the picture stands as proof, and every time I look at it a vivid recollection of summer blazes to life in my head. Because the boy in the picture is me. That is me diving off a friend's dock into a lake thirty minutes from my house. That is my summer's penultimate sunset, gliding serenely to its mooring in the west. And that is my memory, floating just below the present in my mind, caught in mid-motion, poised just so for the camera.
I've been discussing ideas about how memory becomes fixed in the mind, how it drifts in and out of one's life at the oddest intervals. I'm drawn to this idea about how the mind connects visually and spatially to memory, how our memories can be stored, ghostly but intense, like pictures hanging in a gallery (however cliched that metaphor may seem). Reflecting on my life is like sifting through a deconstructed photo album, filled with pictures that talk and smell and cavort wonderfully through dappled sunlight and along dusty, Southern paths. It's bracing to look back on, and I spend a lot of time perfecting my vision, improving the way I meet and know my past selves.
The rub herein is that it's never quite full, this gallery of mine. There's blankness interspersed throughout, hazy areas where gray matter writhes with discontent. And then there are new canvases being hung up each day, new exhibitions that change the layout, the lighting, the panorama of my gallery. My gallery is conceived in a pastiche of regional and cultural influences, the architecture of Chinese tenements and Gothic Cathedrals, bluesy, folksy tunes and the colors of New England in fall. All of this is merely context though, the staging for each vision of my past.
Today was quite possibly the most idyllic day yet that I've encountered here at Harvard. It was sunny and warm again after a few weeks of steadily falling temperatures but windy, so you still know it's fall. Walking across the old yard, I was caught in a yellow storm of leaves. Everything was in motion. Multi-hued rain fell from the sky and whirling dervishes danced like impetuous children along the sidewalks. The moment felt surreal, a picture for a postcard maybe--"Come visit Harvard in Fall!" I paused for a second as I walked, not wanting to look like a awe struck tourist but not wishing to relinquish the wonder of the moment either. Later, after lunch, I laid out by the fountain near the Center for European Studies, let my hand fall indolently into the clear, cold water, and thought about how I would remember this moment, how and why I would paint this picture.
It'll hang one day I think, off in a corner of the gallery with a skein of dust motes obscuring its incandescent, vermilion glow.
No comments:
Post a Comment