The Taste of Madeleine

Remembrance. Funny the nature of memory as it sails through our minds. Like layers of intangible waves, one thought pulls another and we remember our lives in cascading moments of our quiet hours. I marvel at Proust's endeavor, tracking the substance of our own intangibility through our floating memories anchored in pieces of materials gleaned as markers of our presence. The madeleine! That madeleine that opens the lid to the memory box where pop-up houses appear for the town of Combray; then, instantaneously the narrator feels the flesh of his youth clung to his old bones and a man, now aged, becomes young again. This is the genius of Swann's Way!

And so now, I look out my window on a misty midmorning and remember fragments of my conversation with a student in a noisy New York coffee shop yesterday where the encounter paralleled the memory of an old teacher who spoke to me-- a mere student then-- seated in a quiet outdoors cafe on the sidewalks of Berkeley. These gapless memories appear now in a flash as I place my fingers to the keyboard, about to write the substance of that old teacher's advice. I organize my thoughts to speak the point of this entry, as the mist outside my window continually reminds me of the ocean, layering yet another memory on the mind's panoply: the scene from an old movie resurface showing me the wake of a boat moving away from land. A voice likens this movement to life. "In youth," she says, "you see not even a ripple as you gaze out into your life. But, as you age, with expended time, it spreads before you like the wake of a moving ship, extending to eternity." These loosely bound thoughts come and go without my having to question their connections, but for the mist, romancing memory with the elements that touch us now.

But more to the point: that is to say, the aim of this piece. My writing today germinated from what was said about what was said by a teacher who calmed our sense of utter insignificance years ago. For those of us chasing an immaterial form of communication called art, battling for relevance, my student yesterday echoed these same doubts to which he succumbed, only to find a greater loss of significance in himself years later. He spoke of loss and hollowness, of spiritual vapidness amidst years of having 'pushed down,' as it were, the instincts that enlivened him. After years of children and jobs and marriage-- all the elements that wring energy out of us but suppose to give us meaning-- the deeper thirst for self-recognition persisted. This departure he took, the compromises and self-denials, his 'pushing down' have atrophied a self to a death that cries for a kind of resurrection. And this cry has turned into a violence, a kind of anger which one cannot name but permeates all things one touches. It is the flesh calling for its intangible part. And as he spoke to me of atrophy, I remembered Peter then. My teacher consoled us by saying that when an artist retreats from his discipline to hide, he may suffer in seclusion but does not suffer alone, for his suffering is shared by the community he abandoned. His decaying self is felt by the whole that misses its absent part, like an organism that loses a limb, aching to have that part back again, for without it, it ceases to be whole.

And so went the conversation with this student. He mentioned spirit in the same breath as art; conscience became synonymous to consciousness; and these words brought Peter back on the sidewalk where that cafe sat. Those words in youth sounded so smooth, with a fragrance of promise. It hit our young ears with force that now betrayed our ignorance; for however profound we seemed to have understood what he meant, in fact we understood little. The passing years now hang on the words and render them weight with the passage of time. They are what feed us now, older, yet not less hungry, who still need and find great solace in these same words as time moves and we remember them.