Memory Lane

Apologies to the few who actually read this sad excuse of a blog, I've been away working on being a better human being, which is unfortunately a lie and partly the reason why I should actually spend time working on it.

From James Baldwin's "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South":

'It was on the outskirts of Atlanta that I first felt how the Southern landscape--the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances--seems designed for violence, seems, almost to demand it. What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night! Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private. Desire can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree, in the darkness, there; and no one will see, no one will ever know. Only the night is watching and the night was made for desire.'

I was taking a stroll down Memory Lane last night with the girl nextdoor, which means I was walking along Country Lake Road with the girl who lives a mile down that tar-paved pass. I think we saw five or six shooting stars, and I was taken back each time to the night I graduated high school. Sitting on a dilapidated couch on top of a cinder-block hut my friends had built for my previous birthday bash, I saw the biggest tail on a shooting star I'd ever seen. The whipping white light stretched across the sky and lingered for an entire five seconds before disappearing into another time, its flight forever etched in my mind--that white streak against the blue-black sky dotted with dead stars.

It was the first time I went for a night-walk around my old stomp in quite a while, and it was truly a remarkable experience re-engaging with the local populace. A young man and his girlfriend stopped their car to offer us a ride because, as the man driving pointed out, we weren't black, to which his girlfriend in the passenger seat told him not to "start in with the nigger stuff." We thanked them for their offer and left the rank odor of the car and their minds behind. Besides the incense of marijuana and beer oozing from the car, the country night sounds and smells took me back throughout the walk. The fresh smell of field manure and drying corn stalks, a sort of soggy grass smell hung on the cool but still humid summernight air. Just before I reached the last bend on the homestretch, I startled a doe that snorted at me and thrashed off through the high grass and pattered across the rock road before disappearing out of sight into the shadows of trees cast by the single light of an isolated electric pole. Earlier, a dark shadow, I assume an owl, had dove and soared off from a similar distant pole. I didn't hear any shriek of death, but I'm sure it was there if only cut short by the clenched talon. It sounds terrifying perhaps, but the deer snort can be much worse. That was the true sound of fear--my fear--when I first stumbled upon and surprised that buck many years ago. Last night, I was not startled in the least because I've heard it many times since. The first experience, I was paralyzed with fear and also confusion, having no idea what it was that was about to destroy me. The power of that snort, I thought I was being trampled by a horse or some ferocious beast of the forest. I was about to be devoured, until I heard the hoofs against the ground and saw the white tail erect and waving goodbye. It was only a deer of course, but how paralyzing and exhilerating simultaneously, the unknown.

In past walks, I have heard the packs of coyotes howling and cackling in distant fields as well as corn rows only across the blacktop and ditch. Once, I could see them running through the corn, only the second row in from the edge. None of it was as startling as that wide-eyed snort the first time. It is easy for me to conjure those past images, and I can come close to smelling or at least remembering the essence of those smells, but the sound is lost in the echoes of the mind until it is flushed out again by the repeat of the experience.

I was thinking last night about the connection of senses to memory, and this thought was really a continuation of a thought from several weeks before. I had decided that vision was the premature sensation of all the senses while taste, touch, and hearing were dulled. Smell is the grand ripple effect, the reacher of the really big rings. I say that taste, touch, and hearing are dulled, or at least muted for me. I suppose touch is most obviously registered with extreme sensations like hot and cold--the feel of chapping snow on the cheek when one is hit square with a snowball, the singe of the finger too close to the stove. They reside in the memory, but the everyday feel of clothes against the skin or the various textures felt in each moment seem to escape the fields of deep resonating memory for me. When I bite into something, I can store the sensation of the taste and other comparative flavors and I can even manage an immediate image to associate with the food, but the smell caught in the nostrils only moments before is lost to the overworking bumps of the tongue and the ever-flashing slidereal of images in the head. Sound works much the same for me, though, I must admit my hearing is so poor that I do not want to speak much in the way of my impaired judgement in that sense. As I said, vision is premature in that it works too quickly, it becomes over-excited and rushed like reels of film flashing and disappearing as soon as they come. There is no room for resonance, like the slow-working of the scent.

This was all prompted by the smell of a perfume. A girl who had just gotten off the bus behind me walked past. I was instantly struck by the scent of her perfume. I couldn't even describe the smell in itself and independent of the unbreakable association I have formed between the smell and the girl I knew who wore it. As the girl from the bus continued to walk ahead and the scent lingered on the air in her wake, the ripples floating in the breeze struck me in the face and worked through the nostrils into the brain. Instantly, I could see my friend's smiling face and then I could feel her thick black hair between my fingers, the soft silk texture against my skin. Her olive skin glowed in my mind. In a muffled distance, I heard the sounds and textured rhythms of her voice, a Columbian undertone in certain syllables that she accentuated. As the smell worked upon me for several minutes, I could finally taste both pairs of her lips, and I remembered. Baldwin, among scores of others, describes the burning of the tongue against the neck and chest in "Another Country." I never understood that description until this girl, and it was all washing over me in the breeze behind the girl from the bus. I felt the hot and cold tingling sensations coming again. I felt deeply moved and saddened by it all, the memories and mistakes, the losses from time past. What a strange feeling provoked after dismounting a municipal bus.

It was like moving slowly underwater. The reels had been tempered, and the images and sensations hung frozen like stars in the blackness of thought. Strange but brilliant vibrations enacting themselves. I said I was moved, and I often was in the same way, years ago, walking those lonesome high country roads in the rural Midwest, listening to "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" on repeat through the headphones. Looking at the distant set of yellow headlights against the blue-black night. Like yellow orbs they glowed and flowed along the empty road. I wondered where they were headed and where they'd been, if anyone was actually behind them, or if they simply sat on the road isolated to themselves like me and the shadows of memories in the night beneath the twinkle of stars already burned out in past unknown times.