With Color and Salt
Remembering as an act of creation.
It’s been a mild autumn in Tennessee. Warm winds and sunny days have prevailed over the last couple of months. The leaves on the trees start to turn out of habit, not compulsion. The sound of fall, freshly fallen leaves underfoot, often precedes long sleeves and sweaters. Pumpkin-flavored lattes beat all of those things by a country mile, but that has more to do with consumerism and impatience than the weather.
My band used to play a Halloween show every year in Knoxville. The time would change that weekend, and most of us would be up late enough to hear the creaks of the clocks being turned back. It wouldn’t always be cold, but you could tell that winter was coming.
It’s raining right now. The temperature is in the low sixties, and I’ve yet to see my breath in the air. Every year is the same, you wonder, ‘was it like this last year?’ You convince yourself of whatever answer sounds the best, and thus, the past is constructed.
Not long ago, I wrote about Viktor Frankl’s conception of the past, the fact that it should be celebrated for the virtue of chiseling what was only potential into the stone of reality. That was how he imagined the past was created — by doing, by acting.
Upon second thought, however, it would seem that’s only the first half of the equation. The second phase of cementing history is remembering. You’d think we’d be better at it by now.
The instant a moment has passed, it moves irretrievably into the haphazardly maintained cabinets of our mind’s library. There, each memory waits on dusty shelves with bated breath, hoping to be recalled. Some will never be touched again. For instance, I have no idea what happened in my life during Obama’s first term. The good news is that, according to me, Lance Armstrong still has all of his Tour de France wins. The ones that do make it off the shelves formulate our conception of each other, ourselves, and the world around us.
Taking photos is okay, but you have to do something with them. Creating an endless catalog of redundant digital photographs doesn’t cultivate memory other than the lifeless digital simulacrum that Apple will now use to sell you targeted ads. Writing is helpful.
I wrote a piece about the 2020 election that mentioned the weather — it was exactly like it was this year — so that particular question has been cleared up.
Any attempt at capturing what you thought, how you felt about a specific moment in time is a way to immortalize an instant. Poems, paintings, songs, rambling essays, preserve in amber the people we used to be, the lives we once lived — for better or worse.
It’s a way to steel ourselves against the depressing reality that our failing minds will betray us in the end, robbing us blind of the things we swore we’d never forget.
So, my friends, cling to every fleeting second of this life. Every morsel of suffering, of joy, of wonder must be agonized over until calcified. Cave drawings and stalagmites will tell our stories. With color and salt.
After all the winds have blown and after the last wave rushes ashore, while others may be unsure, we can be certain that it rained on a warm November day, that our child was sleeping, and that, in the blink of an eye, we lived.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA