A Whole Life: Why Memory Matters

...breathing...

Photo Cliff Scholz

for Colleen

I awoke at 3am last night and decided to do a recorded, facilitated breathwork exercise. Sometimes focusing on my breathing helps me get back to sleep. But whether I go back to sleep or not, it always helps.

While I was breathing, an image from childhood arose in my mind: in it I was kneeling on the floor in front of the dresser in my bedroom, bent forward over an open book, a biography of artist Marc Chagall, written by Howard Greenfield. As a child, I had been curious to know why my older brother had given me this book for Christmas. When I’d asked him about it, all he said was that I reminded him of this famous painter. I was flattered and intrigued, but his comment left me wondering. At the time I wanted to better understand the gift, and the only way to do that was to at least start reading it. Most likely I’d rather have been watching cartoons or throwing snowballs at the faces of my very best friends, but there I knelt. I’m guessing I would have been about eight or nine years old at the time.

Memory matters. Memories are deep. We live a whole life, a deep life. Life is deep in every moment, and each passing moment can add new kinds of depth, as long as we have a way of accessing it. Memory can help with that. And this kind of vertical plunge into mind and body that can happen with breathwork can be a powerful antidote to the “scroll-swipe-click-react,” electronically induced dementia now spreading rapidly throughout our society. It doesn’t take much to see that after a while we’d end up imitating the technologies and media we interact with. Maybe it’s as simple as this: flat screens flatten minds.

Still, this kind of deep-past recollection is not common in my experience doing breathwork for the last six years. Most of the time I simply weep, which I find helpful. Seems to clear my vision. But interestingly, this was not the first time a memory emerged from that same childhood bedroom while doing this kind of conscious breathing. A couple years ago an image surfaced of a set of glazed ceramic animal figurines given to me by my grandmother. The figurines were all lined up on the righthand side of my bedroom windowsill. I hadn’t thought about them in decades. The animals had come with the Red Rose tea my grandmother drank, prim and proper old lady that she was. Among them were three hippos. That seemed a little much, but I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of the extras. And one might think it irrelevant that my grandmother drank tea with a red rose on the box and animal figurines inside. This is important, though: If a thousand children each had an “identical” ceramic hippo or three, they would be different things in every one of those children’s lives. Further, frankly it doesn’t even matter that millions of other people drink Red Rose tea. This was my grandmother, you understand. So it’s my life. That red rose is in our blood, and so are these incredible animals, and this would be true even if no such brand of tea ever existed. It’s part of who we are. From where I sit right this minute I can see a framed copper tooling my grandmother created, depicting a tiger leaping through the jungle. I don’t know what inspired it, but I know it continues to inspire me. And it’s no accident that one of my daughters bears the name Rose. But she was not named after the tea. She was named after the flower.

Point is, in some ways, we own our universes. Our lives are profoundly personal in their nuances of signification and feeling. And like the hippos, a red rose will be one thing to me and another thing altogether to someone else. As we define ourselves from within and start to more fully inhabit our whole lives, memories that come out of the depths like those I have just shared can help us move forward in new ways.

And that’s exactly what happened last night with the Chagall recollection. Before the sun even had a chance to rise, I made my way out to the bookshelves in the studio, looking for the volume over which I had knelt so many years before. It wasn’t there. I came inside and checked the basement bookshelf. There it was. Time to finally finish reading it. As I read, I realized that I hadn’t gotten more than about 30 pages in on my first attempt.

I don’t claim to have a perfect memory. But still, I recalled reading a line from that book spoken by a friend of the young Chagall, at the time an aspiring artist from a poor Jewish family in the Russian city of Vitebsk. The friend said, “You’re a real artist, aren’t you?” A real artist. In quotes. What did that mean? I wondered then. I still wonder.

Memories sometimes get a bad rap. “Don’t live in the past,” people say. “Be in the now.” And I can see how memories stuck on replay can seem like a trap. But memories that emerge from a vertical plunge into the remote depths of the mind can be extraordinarily revealing. And a life without memory, well, safe to say that’s not a good thing.

Maybe the critical distinction here is: are we fragmenting and getting smaller, or are we growing more unified and whole? And it can be hard to tell, because sometimes when we feel like we’re falling apart, that’s exactly when we’re growing.

Having now finally completed reading the biography, I find myself inspired. It’s the story of a person uncompromisingly devoted to his own vision, a person who had to deal with restrictions imposed upon Jewish people in Tsarist Russia, and then deal with the Communists after the Russian Revolution, and then the Nazis after Chagall had moved to France and France got invaded. Perhaps most poignantly of all, from word go Chagall had to overcome the objections of unsupportive family members and prejudices against artists within his own community. Nothing stopped him. And perhaps even more inspiring was once again seeing the paintings, etchings, and drypoint works with which the book is illustrated.

Strange to say, the essays I post here on Substack do at times feel a bit like what I’m seeing in the compositions of this painter. Why does the cat on the windowsill have a human face and human nearby have two? Why do Chagall’s lovers fly above the city? Why is the violinist green?

All these years later, a lot of what I do in my writing features similar kinds of surrealistic juxtapositions, and not only in essays like this one but also in flash fiction pieces published here, like “The Next Card Played Will Be the Jack of Nasturtiums”. It also felt distinctly surreal to pick up a children’s book I’ve been carting around my whole life and finally start tracing the outlines of its enormous implications. Although according to this biography, Chagall never formally joined the surrealist movement, his works certainly have a surrealistic feeling to them, and he was definitely embraced by that community of artists. And that’s another thing I noticed in this book: Chagall didn’t just make art, he made friends. I just read online that the word “surreal” was coined by Chagall’s close friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. ‘Surreal’ means “beyond real”.

I’m guessing that people whose memories are more or less intact are likelier to find a surreal quality in today’s world. Further, without the associative dimension that a functional memory adds to our reading, an essay like this could come across as completely unglued: “What’s this guy writing about, anyhow? Breathwork? Technology? Art? Memory? Something about tea and tigers? Could he please just stick to one topic?”

The answer to that last question is no. I refer the reader to the paintings of Marc Chagall. One might as well ask, instead of giving us a green violinist and lovers who kiss in impossible ways or fly through the sky together, would Chagall please just position his human subjects on the ground where they belong, and would he also please render them in colors people will immediately understand?

No. No, he would not.

As for me, if I’m doing my job right, I’m hoping that something larger will become apparent as all the images and ideas within an essay like this start to converge. I know it can seem a little surreal at times, but this is the larger vision I’m unfolding, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, petal by red, red petal. And this is always my invitation: to inhabit ourselves as whole beings, to feel the wholeness of this essay as a part of nothing less than a whole person and a whole life, and now, thanks to you reading it, two whole lives, yours and mine, each growing into a bigger kind of wholeness.

That’s the big yes: a whole life, a life that keeps expanding in all directions from its own center. I trust we will find our freedom in the process. It’s not always easy, but then again, sometimes it’s as easy as breathing. And sometimes, it can even feel like flying.

Copper tooling by the author’s grandmother. Photo Cliff Scholz