I am thoroughly entranced by clouds these days… well, maybe all days. They hover over us and define our days as sunny, stormy, crop-growing, stay-inside, or simply terrifying. I like to think of clouds as landscapes upside down, floating continents, the history of the globe but sped up.
Or better yet, let us watch them moving…
Apollo- in Delfi
I recently returned from a educational trip to Rome and Greece with my students and those of colleagues. As I walked around the Plaka and every small town that we visited on our Classical tour, I saw endless shops with souvenirs: from cheap trinkets to pricey replicas and interpretative artistic renderings. All the students–and I–took hundreds of photos. In fact most of the time we viewed the ruins through the lens of a camera, be it a phone or fancy SLR.
On returning home our suitcases bulged with objects acquired along every stop of the way. And this got me thinking: have we replaced interior experiences and memories with exterior objects, things? As a culture we own more stuff than any previous generation in the entire history of the world. Museum visits always end–sometimes start–with a visit to the museum store. We start them young. Disney and Pixar movies are accompanied by merchandise, often before the movie is even released. What does this all mean, apart from enterprising Capitalism? 
Have we replaced our memories with physical objects to record our lives? Photos rather than recall? Souvenirs rather than imagining walking through the ruins at Delfi, Olympia, Corinth? We seem not to trust the transformative and enveloping experience itself and want some physical trace to represent our travels, both near and far. We are our possessions, rather than our gathered thoughts, feelings, recollections. As Plato noted in the Symposium, we are entranced by beauty, lulled by the glow of shiny things. But we must also move beyond this level of simple understanding to a higher/deeper entrancement.
I spent one evening sitting on the pier in Nauplio watching the sun set behind the mountains, across the gulf. Every other minute I was compelled to take a picure and I watched every passerby do much the same. We could not but look at the beauty that radiated from the sunset through the clouds, illuminating the water and the small Venetian fort in the harbor. We humans long for beauty in a deep and irrevocable way that translates into desire– a pure, simply, passionate desire to own and to have that beauty.
But what are we really seeking here? Johann Gottfried Herder captured this best in his poem , Ein Traum:
Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
Auf Erden hier;
Wie Schatten auf den Wogen schweben
Und schwinden wir
Und messen unsere trägen Schritte
Nach Raum und Zeit
Und sind, wir wissen´s nicht, in Mitte
Der Ewigkeit.
We are indeed in the middle of eternity and the things we cling to will vanish. Only memory lives on.
This past year I have joined Cowbird, a site which invites people to tell stories and share images. I am taken by how powerful some of the stories and photos are and am enjoying posting an occasional story myself. There are some power users who post every day–wow, impressive. I wish that I could be as creative so as to find a story on a daily basis. Actually, this might be a good exercise for any of us, not just writers. Every day one ought to write a story about something that happened, that one remembered, an association that an object or person brings to mind. This web of stories can spread out across the Web and offer a narrative portrait of the thoughts and feelings of each person who contributes.
Here is my most recent story that I posted to Cowbird:
My mother has been dead for many years now… over 20. I am astonished to think of this. She will always be sitting in her chair next to the fireplace, across from my father intent on doing the puzzle; she would be either knitting or reading and always spelling words for my father. She wore chopsticks in her hair way before that became a trend for downtown girls. She had been a ballet dancer so we all grew up eating like ballerinas. –Not that I ever remotely resembled one in figure or ability. She lived in books and gave me that gift. She was solitary and with few friends, didn’t seem to mind.
When she became sick in her late 60s, I was accutely aware of her fragility. Kidney disease is not pleasant. My own children loved her and my oldest had given her the name of Dee Dee. She loved this as her own beloved aunt had that same nickname. We have no idea of my toddler son came upon it except it rather flowed from Ginny, Virginia–her name.
I am moving close, quickly, to the age at which she had become sick. How odd to think of myself as old as my mother! She broke my heart by dying so young. –Although in the scheme of things 70 is not really young, is it? There are days where it flits through my mind to pick up the phone and call her. Then I remember.
No one in this world knows us as long as our mothers have known us. They knew us when we were but whispers. And now she is a whisper in my heart.