The Language of Memory

Earliest memories have the grainy faded quality of an early Kodachrome movie, the herky-jerky movement giving pulse to the haloed pictures of a small child amidst adoring adults.   I hardly recognize the child but I know it's me.  Looking at these pictures makes me feel like a voyeur peeking into someone else's life through the narrow end of a telescope.

Earliest memories, I am told, are formed around the same time that a child acquires language.  How else can memories be made without the words to name these fleeting moments?  But the memories you make before you speak are static like old photos because this is where they are formed: from the dipping into the family albums to see those early black and white "snaps" and from the narratives told by the adults who lived and recorded those moments.  The words and the snaps intertwine and form shadowy memories that we can not possibly remember otherwise.  

In that early picture, I am sitting on my mother's lap with my father standing behind.  My grandparents are there too, as are a set of curious neighbors peeking over the high fence that serves as a backdrop to the family tableaux.   

Someone took that picture.  A person who knew something about composition and light, but who is caught up in the moment and doesn't notice the onlookers.  Instead, he captures an easy intimacy.  My mother's tight grip on the child as she beams into the camera lens.  My dad standing behind us, with his direct gaze and laddish stance.  He is 23 years old with a wife and a daughter - you can just about see the man behind that boyish grin.  My grandparents, doting and steady, already projecting the calm centeredness that they would bring to my life.  And me, perched there on my mother's lap.  Every part of me is wide open - eyes, mouth, expression, body leaning into the world with curiosity and surprise, leaning into a life that is full of wonder.

There are a few more photos like this.  In each one there is the child with the beaming smile, bathed in light, oozing confidence.  Then suddenly, there is another picture, the one with the soft black and white tones.  I'm still the center of focus, wearing a pretty gauzy dress my mother made for me to wear. My hair, caught up with a matching bow, falls softly around my face.  I'm looking up, looking out, but my eyes are guarded, my smile slight.  This child I recognize.  It's the look that I know.  This is who I will become.  This picture whispers that somewhere in those early years, I learned to hold back.  To dip my big toe in first to see if it is safe to go out.  To watch.   To hold secrets.  To be cautious and shy.   Two different versions of me.  The one who rushes headlong into life with wide-eyed innocence, alive with naked curiosity and delight in all the world offers.  And the other child who holds something back in her heart before trusting.  I am learning to live an interior life.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...

I have been dipping into the past lately.  A book, a poem, a tidy-up of the spare bedroom to make way for an office, and two deaths have prompted this introspection.   And of course, the time and space created by The Pandemic to explore it.  This introspection is reflected, and perhaps even promoted, in what I'm reading.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields is a penetrating narrative that reveals a life from the inside out as it spreads out across the table of life.  Presented in a series of written pictures and vignettes, Daisy Goodwill Fleet lives in unconventional terms for the day, but is enriched by an inner dialogue that sharpens and separates her from who she believes she is, and how she is seen by the people in her life.   We are able to trace the growing chasm between these two presentations of Daisy through her own thoughts and and the stories told by fathers and husbands and children and friends.  The burden of misunderstanding between these two versions ultimately becomes an albatross that Daisy drags around until she finds release.  

While I am reading The Stone Diaries, those two photos come to mind and I think of the discrepancies presented between them.  The two version of me then and now, and as I look and compare the two faces, I hear the lines from the Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock by the impenetrable T.S. Eliot ,that I have mantra-ed many times over the years.

That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.

 

These lines have played out in my own inner narrative since college days, when I first read Prufrock, as an undergrad taking Modern Lit.   I was 20 years old, four years into my American life and struggling to find my way in a new country completely cut off from all that I had known before.  Like Daisy, I felt a growing chasm within and a deepening sense of being misunderstood.  It wasn't just the misunderstanding created by language and syntax, but also in ways essential to my sense of identity.  I recall an incident reported to me by a concerned friend.  I had said one thing; he heard another.  He didn't like what he heard.  It said something about me that he thought vulgar and coarse.  "That's why he doesn't speak to you," said my friend.  I remember feeling confused and hurt.  I knew I would never say anything like that, yet "that" is what he understood.  It was the beginning of my interior and exterior lives; it was the moment I began to edit.

Like the small child in that faded black and white portrait, I became guarded and cautious but with punctuation marks of sudden impulsiveness where I would veer off course and regret the honesty!  It was the beginning of a time I now call, "The UnKnown Years."  This is where I begin to feel hollow.  And lost.   And those lines of Profrock became my mantra.  How did I get here?  How did this become my life?  Who am I in this place?  "That is not what I meant at all."

As I come to know Daisy through the pages of The Stone Dairies, I recognize her struggle to define her life in her own words and on her terms.   To give her ordinary life purpose and meaning.  To know herself even if others never do.  I sense the quickening to find congruency between the Me I think I am and the Me others see.  The need to be known, to be authentic and to reveal is a journey that many women my age (and those who have gone before) struggle to navigate.  

Looking at the early childhood pictures, I know I have lived that life, but now, like Daisy, I find myself trying to bring the pieces of my soul back together.  But like Daisy, I want to "occupy" my life and tell my own story in my own words.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, 

after the skirts that trail along the floor

And this, and so much more

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

~T.S. Elliot