lue and orange lights cast pools of underwater on the stage. Rosalie and Alva's studio, where I take my daily ballet class, has been transformed for the weekend into a theater. We have all the basics for an evening's performance: wings and mechanized curtains, audience bleachers, sound system and follow spot. Last year they even rigged up a flying apparatus for a ballet version of Peter Pan.
The slap of leather slippers on the wood floor is audible even over the blaring music. Waiting in the wings, I stretch my arches and adjust my costume. My stomach is an upended wheel, spinning.
Next to me on the wall is a life-sized painting of Tamara Karsavina in her costume for Spectre de la Rose, the ballet she danced with Nijinsky. If only she could help me. Not a single step will appear in my stalled brain. This business of remembering a whole dance seems impossible. What made me think I was ready to perform? I am only eleven.
Our prima ballerina glides in the white spotlight, a luminous ghost. A dancer brushes past me and enters the stage. I want to run away.
"Your feet will remember. Let the rest of you follow." The voice is urgent in my ear.
"How can my feet remember? It's my brain that has memory."
Karsavina comes down from the wall to stand beside me in her ruffled skirt and little cap. Rising to the points of exquisitely tiny toes, she looks up at me with enormous Russian eyes.
"Your feet, my dear, have a better memory than your brain. Open the chain of the choreography with the first step."
The strings crescendo. I count furiously, hearing my cue approach. What is that first step?
Karsavina executes a little pas de chat, and I suddenly remember. Then Madame pushes me onstage, I do the pas de chat and a cascade of body-memory returns. I have taken another step into the land of memory.
It was a land I entered when I started ballet lessons at age seven. The body of memories known as the Russian ballet is a tradition that stretches back more than two centuries, through three countries: Italy, France, Russia. It may now be common to turn on television and roam through time and space, but in 1957 the Russian ballet was exotic. Every afternoon I walked into Rosalie and Alva's and entered a different world.
Ballet's craft and culture is still handed down orally from teacher to student. Dancers pride themselves on being vessels of memory, preserving not only the choreography of whole ballets, but even nuances of performance. For example, to perform the Don Quixote Pas de Deux properly, for example, one would have to have learned it from Alexandra Danilova (or her student), absorbing details like how to shake open the black fan the way Tchessinskaya did it. She was taught by the choreographer himself.
We had cheat sheets of memory on the studio walls, paintings of legendary dancers in their most famous roles. A miniature Sistine Chapel, it gave us pictorially the Bible of ballet's steps and poses, costumes and stories.
Memory is the stock in trade of all artists. Dancers and writers use it in different ways. Dancers are interested in what is called working memory, while writers seek access to long term memory, the recesses of the past that rarely make their way into awareness except as dreams or bursts of inspiration.
Working memory is built on repetition, the process of consolidation that moves material from your thirty-minute retention area (short term memory) into long term storage. To memorize a long sequence of dance steps requires mind-boggling repetition. Practicing it over and over sinks the impression deep into brain, lodging it in body memory, as Madame Karsavina taught me. You cram each consonant and vowel of dance language into your muscles, then executing the first step will trigger the entire sequence.
I am grateful to ballet for many things: discipline, beauty and most of all, for learning about memory. All artists inhabit this land. The trick is to live there with skill, to inhabit memory instead of allowing it to inhabit you.
For a poet, feeling is more important than fact. Good poetry depends on vivid and emotionally resonant images, not just on logical connections. These days writers have access to enormous reference libraries through the Internet, but personal memory is still the biggest source of theme and substance.
To locate currents of emotional meaning under the facts is to create art, rummaging in memory's jumble. If you have difficulty getting to that bargain basement of surrealistic pictures, you will have difficulty finding a shape for the writing. Emotional memory gives narrative a personal edge and spin, the resonance that makes it exciting and recognizable. Poets pursue the elusive mood state in long bouts of daydreaming, walking, napping, whatever they do to prepare.
Chasing ideas is an oddly inactive activity. In an essay from her book "The Writing Life," Annie Dillard characterized the writing life as one of extreme inaction while pursuing an inner chase:
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer -- such as it is -- is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.
Flippant, but true. In this passive occupation, you observe with great attention the ongoing wrestling match between emotional memory and literal memory, waiting until you spy an outline that has meaning, one unique yet universal. At that moment you have found the poem's shape, creating a new life out of the old, the "emotion recollected in tranquility."
The act of creating, is one of the best tools for discovering personal meaning. Aurobindo Ghose, the Indian author of the epic poem Savitri, reported that he rewrote his book-length poem six times, re-imagining the whole every time his consciousness expanded and matured. He says he actually used the process of rewriting Savitri as a yoga of self-discovery.
I know many writers who say they would write even if no one ever read their writing. For them, the excitement is the plunge into primordial depths of self, recovering its matter and raising it into the light.
An intriguing theory of emotional memory is that it lodges so deeply that it resides in tissues other than brain cells. Deep feelings get impressed in your very muscles and cause physical distortions. Fear hunches you over, low self-esteem collapses your lungs, emotional trauma weakens your heart. This is what some healers call the mind-body connection. A thriving industry of body work has been created to pummel out what are conceived of as emotional scars in physical tissue.
If dancers believe in body memory, poets believe in word memory, the power of sound to connect with deeper layers of feeling. Memory in all its forms is thought to physically reside in the temporal lobe, specifically in the hippocampus, near the ear. This suggests that poets are onto something.
Scientists have defined a series of connected systems of memory: long term memory, working memory and sensory memory. Long term memory stores material over a long period of time. Theoretically, this memory is infinite. Information is never lost, but becomes less and less accessible over time due to erosion of pathways to it. We become lost in the forests of memory, our breadcrumb trails erased by falling leaves.
Working memory holds information that is being actively worked on, information from the senses or from long term memory. In working memory, information decays rapidly unless rehearsed. I want to plaster this fact on the wall of every ballet studio. Now I know why my teacher "Do it again!" yelled so often. Practice not only makes perfect, it makes permanent.
Memory access techniques have been recently defined. One I find especially useful is chunking, or grouping information together. A sequence of twelve numbers might be hard to recall, but you can memorize three chunks of numbers (your social security number).
Dancers often use chunking. A pattern of steps becomes a chunk. In class, the teacher demonstrates a sequence once, twice, then off you go. My childhood terror in ballet class was learning new combinations. I was afraid I would not remember the steps and be left standing still while everyone else was moving across the floor.
Being verbal, I learned to group steps in words -- "down-up-up, down-up-up" or "two chainé turns, chassé, pas de bourrée, leap." Others mumble or puppet their fingers through the patterns. Some repeat only the arm movements. Watching a room full of dancers using their favorite mnemonic devices is hilarious.
We tend to remember the first few words in a paragraph better than the middle words. This is called the primacy effect. We also remember the ending words, the recency effect. Rare words are harder to remember than common words and words which create a strong image (blue elephant) are well remembered.
To delve into the hidden recesses of long term memory is like wiggling your ears or waiting for inspiration. What you do not do is easier to describe than what you do. A state of relaxed and diffuse awareness invites the happening.
Long term memory fires off constantly and involuntarily, in the way that a nerve twitches. Random recall is common, and associative recall is the fabric of ordinary awareness. To voluntarily call up memory, however, requires finding the end of a deeply lodged thread and following it, no matter what you might come across.
We routinely play memories over as dreams during REM sleep. One theory is that REM sleep increases the activity of neuron circuits which are usually dormant during wakefulness. In other words, memories which are not part of active, daily awareness are relived during REM sleep so that we can remember them when needed.
The trick of artistic inspiration is to recover this buried material while awake, in all its cinematic, full five senses detail. Little is known about how information from the senses is stored and recalled. We know sense memory connects with emotional memory in strange ways. Proust ate a tea cake one afternoon and its scent triggered a whole lifetime of memories, eight volumes' worth.
Writers teach themselves to observe, putting their sense memories into Olympic training. No matter how well you take notes or photos, most of what you write about must be first captured in your sense memory. Away from their desks, many writers are able to put a large number of words into short term memory.
When I use this faculty, I often key off a visual impression: a leaf, a clock, a nose. I keep the image in mind through phrases (chunks of words). The phrases will stay with me for about thirty minutes. If I cannot find a pencil in that time, my muse assumes I was just kidding and goes to visit a writer down the block.
Sitting in an outdoor café in Portofino, Italy, I looked up at the green cliffs and down to blue, green and red rowboats bobbing in the harbor. I had that odd feeling called déjà-vu. This was my first trip to Italy, but this small harbor, with its elegant boutiques and jewel-box hotels, seemed familiar.
I was probably reminded of the boats and houses of the Italians who live in San Pedro. As I later learned, most of San Pedro's Italian families came from the Ligurian coast, from towns and villages in the Portofino area. They may have selected their new home as an act of memory, its features reminiscent of the home they were leaving. The sensory impressions that said San Pedro to me said Liguria to them.
Writing a memoir is perhaps one of the most extended acts of remembering. When we read an account of someone's life, we imagine it to have been written it in one long, unbroken act. Nothing could be further from the way memory works. Memory emerges the way an oil painting goes on in layers. First the rough sketch, then a deepening of light and dark. Each layer focuses on a different aspect, color and detail slowly fill in.
Siblings are useful for reminding you of the sketchiness of memory. You think you have perfectly recalled that family Thanksgiving in 1957 in Fullerton, when you first met your deaf cousin Susie. Then your brother says you have merged two separate Thanksgiving dinners. Cousin Susie, he says, was nowhere near Fullerton on that Thanksgiving in 1957. She was not even born until 1958.
How could I "remember" the poignancy of her deafness in the midst of our brassy-voiced, cross-talking family? Why did this "memory" come complete with vivid visuals? I can see confusion and helplessness on her six-year-old face, feel what must have been her constant perplexity in the hearing world. How could I "remember" her turning first to one person and then another with a puzzled smile, while no one helped her?
Apparently my emotional memory has skewed my long-term memory. I have connected and made a family myth out of a disconnected series of events. I connected those pictures with the theme of how often we overlook one another's reality. I have unconsciously made my memories into a work of art, a collage in progress. My memory superimposed different events to make sure I would remember the damage of neglect and my family's penchant for loud but disconnected conversations.
Art depends on pattern and repetition. In life, patterns are often too subtle to be immediately perceived. Artists impose structure on memory to clarify the elusive patterns.
Jung believed there exists a layer of universal memory under personal memory. According to his idea, every life dips into the well of collective life and all stories explore a basic set of human archetypes. That would make each of us not just an individual, but a whole collections of personalities.
At age nine, I formed an idea similar to this. I was an avid reader and devoured a book my friend gave me on the subject of reincarnation, Many Mansions. Reading this turgid account of past life recall convinced me that I could recall having lived in ancient Egypt. At this young age, I lacked a strong sense of time's linearity and began to believe that when I grew up I could move back to that Egypt.
My parents did everything they could to explain away my fantasy. They tried to explain time's forward progress. I did not believe a word of it. After all, I had "memories" of ancient Egypt.
In today's jumble of media imagery, we all absorb memories that are not our own. We all "remember" other lives, without always knowing where the impressions came from. The idea that a genuine past life memory may be triggered by a movie or book seems silly, but just because you are paranoid does not mean you are not being followed. If we have had other lives, and memories of them sometimes break into awareness, it could be artistically useful.
One of the most startling déjà-vu's I ever had occurred in the Roman Colosseum. While standing outside and listening to a half an hour lecture by our tour guide, Massimo, I was worried that I might have a gruesome past memory. In this arena where people and animals were slaughtered for an evening's entertainment. Perhaps I had been a Christian martyr who met a nasty set of teeth.
Someone in our group asked about martyrs in the Colosseum. Massimo drew himself up in all his Roman pride.
"Look around," he said. "Do you see a cross here? A church? Every site of martyrdom in Rome has been turned into a church. Not one Christian was killed within these walls! Not one."
After three days of Massimo's speeches, I wondered.
At last we entered through enormous arches. We came out into a wide sunny space and, stopped in the first floor boxes reserved for nobility. I felt oddly expansive as I looked across the ancient arena.
The absence of a floor revealed a honeycomb of cubicles. There gladiators, martyrs and beasts had waited to ascend on special elevators designed for spectacular entrances. Tier on tier of seats rose behind us. Suddenly I wanted to charge out into the center of the arena waving a sword. I wanted to hear the applause of fifty thousand Romans.
Maybe it was the natural reaction of a performer to a good stage, but my thoughts shocked me. What was wrong, pre-menstrual tension? An incipient cold?
Perhaps if I had ever been here before, it was not as a martyr of faith. If I had lived another life in Rome, it may have been in a very different capacity.
I continued to quietly enjoy my elation, appreciating the physical glory of gladiatorial training and discipline, not to mention the hero worship. Here I was in Italy on a pilgrimage, however. It seemed ludicrous to share my insights with my traveling companions. They had all probably been martyrs.
I stood next to a dancer I had trained and performed with. For some reason, I began to suspect the misty gleam in Nancy's eye was more than appreciation of the architecture.
"A far memory?" I asked quietly.
"Gladiator," she whispered sweetly.
We fell into each other's arms.
A man who had brain damage was interviewed on television. He was a medical phenomenon because the part of his brain that was affected is the part that consolidates memory for long term storage.
He could remember his past before the accident that caused the damage, but all memories since then could only be stored in short term memory. If you were introduced to this man, he might remember you for twenty minutes. Then you were a stranger again.
The man without long term memory seemed happy in a child-like way, but he was not entirely content. He looked distracted, as though aware that he had forgotten something important.
I keep thinking about him. I hope that before his accident he was not a writer. His odd, Zen-like state reminds me that, however painful our memories are, we need them for the fullness of that state which our language so inadequately terms being.
Earth Lessons is Rachel Dacus' first poetry collection, published in 1998 by Bellowing Ark Press. Her work appears in print and online in: The Bitter Oleander, Cedar Hills Review, Conspire, Melic Review and Switched-On Gutenberg. She has had poems included in two anthologies: The Poetry of Roses (Abrams, 1995) and Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press). For more information see Rachel Dacus' web page: http://home.earthlink.net/~dacusr
© Rachel Dacus