Closet Paintings

A mostly hidden blog by Mechanical Grace.

When I was 8 or 9 I did a messy, free-form painting, the type that starts with beautiful colors but ends up a brownish tragedy. Still, small flashes of color remained. When I looked at the abstract mess after it had dried, I noticed a tiny shape that looked remarkably, precisely, like a small house, perched on a ledge. Suddenly the chaotic whorls became a cliff face, balancing this little house, and the grayish yellow strip across the top of the page, an odd-colored sky. Looking more carefully I found people, other little buildings, a horse. I marveled at having created such an objective reality, not because it was an accident-- on the contrary, I tried to forget that-- but rather because it seemed such an accomplishment to have achieved that impossible magic, verisimilitude. I kept the painting in the closet and would look at it in private, feeling unreasonably proud, and engrossed in the story I'd hidden in my own painting. I never expected anyone else to see the things I saw, and I still don't, but I work more intentionally now, so you never know...

June 10

50. Madeleine Effect

Yesterday I was lying on the bed with the window open. The temperature, the dry air, the breeze, the shade-lashed sunlight.. it was one of those moments when you just disappear into a perfection of physical feeling that takes you over, saying, “This. This this this.”

And as sometimes happens (ask Proust) the this connected instantaneously and viscerally to an older ‘this,’ one I had no reason to recall ever having existed. It brought forth a moment from maybe 32 or 33 years ago, standing outside the public library in Glen Rock, New Jersey, a place I went maybe half a dozen times in my life, and never for any memorable event or reason. I don’t know anything further—nothing important, nothing trivial— about the particular moment my brain plucked from the past. I don’t know what I was doing there, how I was feeling, whether I was alone; I don’t know what happened just before or after. All I know is that that time and place suddenly came to me, or I to it.

What’s amazing to me about these flashes is how common they are, really. Once you learn to pay attention, you realize they happen constantly, probably thousands upon thousands of times a day. They’re as incidental and lightning-fast as the recoil of a fired rifle (and just as powerful, if they take you by surprise). The trick is learning to catch them.  Have you ever tried to keep your eyes open when you sneeze? This is not much different. It runs contrary to your natural reactions, but you can override those with a bit of practice.

It’s remarkable to think, then, about just how much matter your memory comprises, and that these many sensations and pictures exist as myriad, deceptively finite electrical paths from neuron to neuron to neuron, without known destination or metaphysical translation.

Just something to think about.