One of the things that stuck with me through England, England was Martha's 'first memory, her first artfully, innocently arranged lie' (page 4). She remembers being in the kitchen with her mother, who is singing while she cooks. The narrator goes on to say that 'even today when Martha turned on the radio and heard anything like 'You're the Top' … she would suddenly smell nettle soup or frying onions, wasn't that the strangest thing? - and that was another, 'Love Is the Strangest Thing', which always meant the sudden cut and seep of an orange for her'.
What interested me is the connection between music and smell, the way memories are able to both draw upon and move across senses, even link together at times. For me these two senses bring the most vivid memories. I feel that photographs are something of a false friend; I used to always take my camera with me to concerts and found that I would not remember much of the concert as I was paying too much attention to taking photos. In some ways I feel that photographs present a more constructed memory, with your feelings and recollection being swayed by what is framed in the picture. Smells and sound paint a much broader picture to me, and through them I can remember a certain event far more easily.
I remember that I used to always read whilst listening to music. When I was 10 or 11 I read Philip Pullman's The Northern Lights, and now if I put on the album that I was listening to regularly when reading this book I can recall quite a lot of the details of that time. This is not always the specific words, but more the feel of those nights, things like where and how I was sat, what I was drinking, the time of year. More recently I have found that I am unable to separate an album from a book I was reading a few years ago because I would listen to it on repeat. Certain tracks will bring to mind passages or events from the book and I find it impossible to detach them into individual entities. Yet without the music I can barely remember the book at all.
It fascinates me that certain smells or sounds can trigger a memory. I am prompted to remember events from when I was 5 or 6 with the right trigger, the right song or taste. However, I do not know if these are 'true' recollections or just another 'artfully, innocently lie' to keep my childhood always happy and forever sunny. What examples of other memory triggers are there, and what senses do they arouse?
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Dear Brendan,
ReplyDeleteThe connection between different sensory perceptions is very interesting, and presents an especially fascinating connection to memory, in my opinion.
This phenomenon of synesthesia can be employed in literature to produce extremely striking effects. Baudelaire evokes this in his famous poem Correspondences:
(…)
As the long echoes, shadowy, profound,
Heard from afar, blend in a unity,
Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity,
So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.
Odours there are, fresh as a baby’s skin,
Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass,
- Others corrupted, rich, triumphant, full,
Having dimensions infinitely vast,
Frankincense, musk, ambergris, benjamin,
Singing the senses’ rapture, and the soul’s.
Another author who is famous for engaging in questions of sensory perceptions and memory is Marcel Proust, who has committed his incredible tour de force In Search of Lost Time to these themes. I found the following passage especially interesting in connection of your considerations: ‘taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’
(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, p. 54)