The paths the heart and mind travel when left untended can be both strange and revealing. I was Googling a location, trying to find out where I’d be filming the next day. The map opens up to the entire United States, and there I see, tucked away carefully near the east coast, right where it’s always been, the state of Pennsylvania. I zoom in, find Williamsport, my father’s old hometown, and suddenly my need to find the filming location evaporates. I find the town, type in his old address, and find myself floating, as it were, over the home he lived in where he grew up so many years ago. I remove the street names to just see house and trees, and remember the shape of his house and the back yard with the giant pine tree (now gone) and it’s little garage.
Memories suddenly flow through me like water, a flood of images, sounds, smells, feelings... waking up at 4:00 AM to go fishing with my Dad, the time I stayed there with my grandma right after my week at Boy Scout Camp, the taste of salt on a fresh cantaloupe, fooling around with some neighbor kids for hours as a hot summer’s evening wandered to a close, the chirping of the crickets that grew like a symphony, the mustiness of the garage that held hundreds of my grandmother’s dusty antique collection, the solemn ticking and sonorous gong of the little clock on the mantle, the memory of scraping my elbow raw sliding down a ramp on my bike... My God, I realized... it was all still there, somewhere within. All of it.
I have thought of none of these things for many, many years, but clearly, they all lie complete but hidden, waiting to be called up by some mysterious mechanism, some fantastical device that stores every impression we gather during our time here on this orb. Nothing is lost, though much is consciously unrecalled through lack of use of the neural pathways. Doctors doing brain surgery discovered that the oldest of memories could be completely recalled by touching areas of the brain with a cryonic probe... not just details of what happened, but the sounds, the smells, the sensations. The human being, it seems, is a fairly unique, highly accurate recording device that is always on.
To what end? From an evolutionary point of view, how does this serve us as a species? It doesn’t. Not really. Oh sure, having a concept of ‘the past’ gives us an advantage that allows us to build on a series of successes or failures that over time culminate in what we call ‘civilization,’ but the results of this particular experiment aren’t in yet. The ability to store such precise sensory data isn’t necessary to create a civilization so much as abilities like refraining from killing each other off, creating and using tools, communicating effectively, working together for common purpose, etc. Remembering what the subway station smelled like at 59th St. when I was 10 isn’t one of those critical pieces of information upon which hangs the future of our species. But it’s there, nonetheless, tucked away between the feeling of buying my first comic book and the salty taste of the 5 cent pretzels sold by the little vendor outside PS 152 in Brooklyn after the winter weather broke up and the spring crocus poked up in my front yard. Then there was the coal chute that...
The present calls. Like some time-traveling Superman, I swoop up from 1950’s Pennsylvania, leaving the pleasant valleys, trout streams, gentle, rounded hills smoky with mist in the early morning sunrise, and memories of another, more innocent time – and tap in the address of the film location. Time to go to work. An interesting experience, this. I’ll always remember it.
