there is something unique about our earliest memories, something visceral.
I think it has something to do with the nature of our minds at certain stages, phases, whatever.
each one of us is different, and in trying to explain it to people, I find that its very challenging to capture the quality of these memories, the further back the more inaccessible, and it has to do with the fact that our minds — that is we — are changing, becoming more socialized, amalgamated, “normal” and in effect losing our uniqueness.
so in challenge to the inexorable march toward oblivion that I sense more and more each day, each year, as I pass through middle age, from youth to old age, the need for me to capture and express these experiences to you, dear reader, grows from a passing notion to a need, to an obsession.
and I find that even when successful, a moment’s reflection, an instantaneous flash extrapolated in all its savory complexity becomes volumes. thus, per proust.
and in the end, no one cares about “the madeleine”, so to speak, what hitchcock called “the macguffin” — the bag of jewels that all the characters in a movie are scheming and fighting over — but in which the audience has no vested interest. it is merely a device designed to motivate the actors.
and so with these germs, these seeds of personality, and to the extent that they posess universal qualities, these essences of humanity.
for example, no one cares that as I slept, or nearly slept as an infant or still very young child, I heard my father’s voice, raised, but still low, rumbling like thunder, obliquely threatening and to me, frightening. and no one cares that to this day, certain mumbling voices or phrasings that share that characteristic — slurred, perhaps drunken, deep, angry but desperate in its numb pasionlessness — I get a certain feeling that I’m sure is not typical among people on this side of the prison wall.