You searched for it, you got it
Sometimes, I wonder why people Google certain things. Often the top search terms that appear on Google Trends are related to breaking political, economic or entertainment news. But sometimes, the results are simply surreal. Like parts of this article.
Yes, I’ll admit that I’m not watching the Today show, Dr. Phil, Oprah or Regis and Kelly. People are watching those programs while seated at their computers. They’re searching for subjects brought up on those shows; I get that. But what is it that has drawn the attention of the online public to Salvador Dali’s class surrealist painting “The Persistence of Memory?”
Sure, you can take a look at it online and understand that time is ephemeral, but that doesn’t solve your budget-busting issues. An online payday loan (or military payday loans in Oregon if you are so inclined) will not melt. They will persistently boost your bottom line when the bottom threatens to drop out of your corrugated sailing shingle of waxwork, your linguine razor at the ready for encounters with overdraft mavens of monkish solemnity. Fish fall from the iPhone; log, rinse and rephrase your seven-year financial itch plan. Be a responsible flounder.
Dali persists
Paul Simon saw angels in the architecture, Christopher Hume of The Toronto Star sees the surreal in the shelter hulks surrounding our solitary, shambling flesh villages. Dali and the surrealists had a great influence on the art form of buildings. Is it purposeful? Is it accidental? Barcelona is known in no small part for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, whose melting churches and muezzin Moor structures sing the charms of a great city. Yet Paris, which is considered the “Mother City” of surrealism, stands as rational as the Arc de Triomphe and majestic as the Eiffel Tower. Few irrationalities melt the landscape like butter love. It splashes at random on Mexico City, Mumbai and beyond, so you see it’s difficult to find a coherent surreal plan among the architecture angels. But that could be part of the plan.
Toronto, writes Hume, appears on the surface to be far from a hotbed for surrealism. But the odd juxtapositions make for a varied landscape. “High-Anglican Gothic” and post-war modern slammed together with the rugged Canadian landscape to create an outwardly searching mix. That’s one side of it, but “starchitecture” projects with a dash of the surreal (as Hume puts it) also define the city. Spiral staircases leave buildings on their way to the stars. Daniel Libeskind’s “crystals” of glass and aluminum and glass from walls speak to the brain from the unconscious quarry. And then there’s Will Alsop’s flying tabletops that pay duties to the memories of M.C. Esher.
Irrational civic enterprise
Sometimes, a certain persistence of memory applies to the tiny public spaces of Hume’s city. Order is on the edge of melting, but it won’t go away. It may change beyond recognition, but it’s there. The reporter mentions “the north side of Charles St., east of Yonge, beside the entrance to 30 Charles,” where there is an opening to no place in particular (unless that is your destination to begin with). Follow the trail in no particular way and you’ll stand upon a concrete platform with a bike encircled by towers.
What is happening in this space? It’s leftover, it’s nothing, it’s something particular. It is certainly deliberate. The bike will remain so long as the towers stand and our own persistence of the memory erects barriers of reason. We give the bike purpose, yet wonder persistently at just how still a still life can be when invisible pelicans transport potential energy in their bills and laws.
Leaving Toronto
Hume’s persistence of memory for his local landscape leads him just outside to Mississauga next. “An empty sunburnt landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope,” he calls it. “Marilyn Monroe” twin condos sashay across the street from the “metaphysical” city hall. The ladies bring their feminine swerve with no reserve, breasts, hips and thighs to the sky. Mississauga City Hall, wings about to take flight, spires and postmodern bracing against the persistence of memory for all things boring, is about angles rather than curves. They’re sexy buildings, daring buildings, far from utilitarian.
Mississauga was built fast, writes Hume. It has little persistence of memory on its own, as it has had no time to sit back and ponder itself. “There’s less occasion for the conscious mind to intervene and the results are closer to the irrational impulses the surrealists celebrated,” he writes.
Of madelines and amygdalas
Enough about Toronto. The vehicle being driven here is a V8 Dali, complete with vitamins, minerals and nasal-labial exodus that stir our imaginations. We feel the Persistence of Memory in different ways. But the common thread is emotion. Marcel Proust in “Swann’s Way” testifies to taste and smell
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, 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.
What triggers us? What floats our boat? Google searchers know that the amygdala is involved. Significant research points to the connection between the emotion centers of the brain (like the amygdala) and memory… Proust knew (and scientists know) that memory and emotion cannot be separated. From the scientists:
The amygdala and hippocampal complex, two medial temporal lobe structures, are linked to two independent memory systems, each with unique characteristic functions. In emotional situations, these two systems interact in subtle but important ways. Specifically, the amygdala can modulate both the encoding and the storage of hippocampal-dependent memories. The hippocampal complex, by forming episodic representations of the emotional significance and interpretation of events, can influence the amygdala response when emotional stimuli are encountered. Although these are independent memory systems, they act in concert when emotion meets memory.
Feelings are a persistence of memory
The unconscious mind takes the lead in how memories serve us. In pleasure, pain and utility (or a combination of these elements), persistence of memory is anything but rational. Rationality is a tool we can choose to wield, but the mind resists absorbing it within. The way is shut like a injunction between sperm and seed. In order to accept the surrealism that shapes us, we must accept the power of the unconscious mind. It’s a rational transaction in an other irrational chain of life for us organisms scratching a life here. Oh, an online payday loan and military payday loans in Oregon are also rational choices. But what life can throw at us is frequently irrational, so we must be persistent in applying the best tools available to surmount choirs and choirs of trouble. It’s what Salvador Dali did in his life, even when the persistence of memory would melt and decay. He chronicled the cycle of degradation and survival.
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