Friday Frivolity no. 9: The Persistence of Memory?

coming to terms with death, mortality, and loss

My lovely readers, I’m so sorry I haven’t posted in ages! My father passed away suddenly at the beginning of this month, and it’s only now that I’m starting to slowly get back into the swing of things. I ended up writing about my father for this week—not much of “frivolity,” but then, that’s life sometimes.

This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you’ll get a short essay, plus a moodboard, 3 things I’m currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I’ve been reading lately, a little shimmer of poetry, a “beauty tip,” and a question to spark thought.

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The Persistence of Memory?

GHOST: I am thy father's spirit
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54)

Is there anything as harsh, as bitter, and yet as indifferent as forgetting? Slowly the light seems to flicker in that room in which I keep the memory—ashes in a marble urn at the dead center of a mausoleum—and then it grows dim; the air seeps out of the room like a sea retreating; the room itself recedes from me, vanishing as though at the end of a long corridor. I allow this process to happen; whether it heals me or not, I don’t know. While the hands of my heart yearn to stretch themselves out, to grasp what falls away, to cling, clutch, close its fingers over something, the mind voices that gentle but firm injunction, “No more,” and turns away. The eyes that look through the veil of the present into the vague past are futile: I must shut them like one shuts the eyes of the dead.

In my youth, I must have been more passionate, I must have had more ardor, I must have loved harder. Age has begun to teach me… not indifference, exactly, but a calm and placid acceptance, like the surface of a still lake. A breeze may wrinkle that smooth countenance once in a while, a ruffle of light wind, but I no longer know the convulsions. I may sob, but the duration is shorter each time; nothing has the power to devastate me any longer, except sufferings which are not mine: images of children in war zones, some local story about a house burning down, the injustices of the past.

Nothing devastates me. Once upon a time, I was the river rushing in its torrents and currents, I was the white foam continually reforming itself in a hundred spasms of fury, I was swept away, I was borne down sheer drops and steep precipices, through clusters of treacherous rock, past fallen branches; now I sit on the shore, and the water runs past me, and I feel the grass beneath my palms and the sun on my skin. Surely the risk of losing one’s life here is significantly less—but so too is the pleasure, even the pleasure of pain, the thrill, the agony, the adventure of feeling fully. 

I always attached my identity to feeling. If I failed a math test, at least I could console myself that I cried harder about it than anyone else; if a new friend smiled at me, my happiness shot me up the arch of a rainbow, and I looked upon the world as from an iridescent throne. The world’s saturation seemed set specially high for me. Now I grow to learn the subtler beauty of the more muted colors, trading voluptuous magenta for her more ascetic cousin mauve. 

People I once knew intimately become names, hardly more to me than the letters carved into some stone of Ancient Rome—the name of the emperor Trajan, faded by time, or that of his page, or his slave, or his lover. Memories are all we have and all we are. If there was anything to spur the invention of writing—or photography or smartphones—it must have been this desire to hold onto our dear departed dead for just a little while longer. 

People are so firm when they live with us, so solid, so vivid, so warm and so real—and then all we have when they go are ghosts, vague figments, empty air, a little ash that mixes with water and then loses itself in the current of time. Maybe there is a deeper work of memory, something that demands more of me, something that needs me to dig, excavate, claw out, and then, even if all I have are fragments, like pieces of an ancient pottery, I could put them back together again into something almost solid. But one needs energy to dig, and I, too, after all, am merely a name, only a rubbed-out trace, or less than a whisper, or nothing.

Mood Board of the Week 

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Illustration by Julie Verhoeven in Fashion Images de Mode, No. 6 by Lisa Lovatt-Smith (2001): Julie Verhoeven first began her career as a fashion illustrator and designer and worked for John Galliano as his first design assistant. I love this look into her home in Curbed magazine. 

2. High Tech Transparent Nintendo Game Boy from the 1995 “Play It Loud!” campaign: I would kill for this transparent Game Boy. My father had “Vibrant Yellow,” which he gave to me when I was a child and which still remains in my nightstand, still playable, to this day. 

3. Chord diagram from Bioinformatics for All: My father used to make a lot of these chord diagrams for work, and they always fascinated me. Of course, not being a graphs-and-charts sort of person, I never really understood them, but I remember begging him to give me one to put in a moodboard simply because of the colors. My father’s chord diagrams had the prettiest colors. Unfortunately, he couldn’t let me use them because they were for his work, but I always loved how he would show them to me after he had made them. 

4. Apple iMac G3 Flower Power from 2001: In February of 2001, Apple decided to experiment a bit and released two iMacs that had patterns molded directly into the plastic. Apparently, the designs took 18 months to perfect, but the boring tastes of computer-shoppers in 2001 meant they didn’t sell well. However, you can still find a few on eBay!

5. Paolo Roversi, Roos for Dior, Studio Luce, rue Paul Fort, Paris 2017: Paolo Roversi is a fashion photographer whose work I love for its dreamy ethereality. He usually works in more subdued tones, but the candy colors of this photograph are irresistible. 

6. Murano glass dolphin ewer, Venice, early 20th century: Whenever I see Murano glass, I’m reminded of when I went to this little island off of Venice with my parents. In 1291, all Venetian glassmakers were required to move there because the city feared that the fire involved with glassmaking would threaten its wooden buildings. The island continues to be known for its glass industry to this day, and the Murano Glass Museum is one of my favorite museums.

7. Incredible Colors by Philip Chang: This photograph shows flamingos flying over Lake Natron in Tanzania. The lake’s large salt deposits attract toxic cyanobacteria, which gives the lake its unique colors. It is also home to three-quarters of the world’s lesser flamingos, who use it as a regular breeding area because the bacteria keeps out predators.

8. iPods and iPod Nanos: more Apple! I just love the colors here. I think we need to start having more bright colors in technology again.

9. 1980 Atari 400 & Atari 800 vintage advertisement: My dad was always a tech nerd, so when I came across this ad I immediately thought of him and his archive of old computing machines. You can learn more about the fascinating history of 8-bit Atari computers in this PC Mag article.

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

My father’s favorite films edition

1. Amarcord (1973): Federico Fellini was one of my father’s favorite film directors, and a couple of years ago, for his birthday, my mother and I bought him the Fellini centenary box set from the Criterion Collection. He was thrilled. We used to love picking out a movie and watching it together, discussing it afterwards, and debating about which one to watch next. Out of all of them, Amarcord, the first one we chose to watch, was our favorite. The name of the movie comes from the Romagnol phrase a m’arcôrd (“I remember”), and it revisits Fellini’s own childhood near the seaside town of Rimini in the 1930s.

   

   The central character is the boy Titta, and the story unfurls, as memory does, in vignettes—the practical jokes played by schoolboys on their teacher; the political rallies of Fascist Italy; an American ocean liner gliding past in the night, festooned with lights; the voluptuous Gradisca, object of fantasy, in her red beret and red coat; the first effervescent white puffballs of spring floating through the air; a peacock in a snowstorm. What is captured is nothing more or less than life itself—in its grandeur, its humor, its variety, its noise and color, its exuberance, its melancholy, its beauty, and its everyday poetry, which crystalizes for us only in retrospect.

2. The Seventh Seal (1957): Ingmar Bergman was another favorite director of my father’s, and The Seventh Seal is a movie he showed me a few years ago. My father and I had the same sense of humor, and I remember how, unexpectedly for a film about death, we had laughed a great deal. Now I turn to it to understand mortality and to come to grips with the tenuousness of life. So, too, must the knight Antonius Block (Max van Sydow), newly returned from the Crusades to a Plague-ridden 14th-century Sweden. There he challenges Death (a Grim Reaper-esque personification) to a game of chess, but of course, this is not a game the knight—nor any of us—has any possibility of winning. All we can do is play the game as well as we can, and with good humor. 

The Seventh Seal (1957)

3. Ikiru (1952): Akira Kurosawa was a director all three of us loved equally (my mother had less patience for Fellini and Bergman), and in Ikiru, he, too, takes up the theme of confronting one’s mortality, albeit in a very different universe to Bergman’s: 1950s Tokyo. There, an aging, widowed government employee becomes diagnosed with stomach cancer and learns he has less than a year to live. Some people—I am one of them—are motivated only by deadlines, and thus the man, Kanji Watanabe, is spurred into action—into life itself. He first plunges himself into the hedonistic pleasure of the city’s nightlife, but this proves unfulfilling. He then meets a young woman who takes on life with vitality and optimism and, inspired, he decides to circumvent the slowness of bureaucracy in order to actually help the people who come to his public works office. The film is a poignant memento mori—if only we didn’t need death to bring some urgency to this all-important business of living!

Ikiru (195

Words of Wisdom/Poetry Corner

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

When he was in school, my father was often made to memorize bits of poetry, both English and Telugu, and Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet was a passage he especially loved to quote lines from (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”). So much of Hamlet concerns fathers and the relationships between parents and children, and Polonius is one of many models of parenthood the play gives us. To be honest, I mostly remember Polonius for his flaws: his officiousness, his spying, his pomposity, his propensity for aphorisms. Sometimes he comes across as a garrulous old fool, sometimes as a more insidious, scheming busybody. When it comes to his son Laertes, who is going away from Denmark to study in Paris, Polonius asks his servant Reynaldo to go to Paris, too, in order to spy on Laertes. He wants Reynaldo to ask around about Laertes and dig up whatever dirt he can find, even if he has to make up lies about Laertes’ bad habits in order to get at the truth. 

This is something my father would never do (he was too honest), but when I was in college, he always wanted to track my location in order to make sure that I was safe and in case anything happened to me. Things like this used to really annoy me; now I see them as just another expression of how much he loved and cared for me, and I would give anything to share my location with my father just one more time. 

Rereading Polonius’ advice, I’m struck by how sound and solid so much of it is. These are actually really good precepts to live by, and very fatherly ones at that. Indeed, my own father was always true to himself, and he never expected or wanted me to be anything other than what I was—he only wanted me to be the best version of my true self, and he saw me more clearly, I think, than I saw myself, both the good and the bad. It is only during this reading of the passage that I noticed Polonius gives his blessings to his son twice: once at the beginning, once at the end. But a father’s precepts are his blessings, and they must be grappled to one’s soul with hoops of steel.

Polonius Behind the Curtain by Jehan Georges Vibert, 1868

Beauty Tip

Do something to honor the memory of someone who has passed. Watch a favorite movie of theirs, listen to their favorite song, make their favorite recipe, or look at photographs of them and cherish the time you had together.

Lingering Question

What’s one step you can take today that will get you closer to accomplishing something you want to do before you die?

Etc, etc.

I posted a note on Substack a little while ago that ended up getting quite a bit of traction, and I really love how people have been sharing links to their work in the comments. If you are looking for something new to read, please check out those comments!! It’s so beautiful to have this sense of community and to see people being inspired by a random thought I had one afternoon!

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From the Archives

A Matter of Life and Death