Memory, paintings, Manet, Anna, and the essence of time
Have never seen lily pads in person - or have I? Maybe, at a man-made pond,
at a green-scape in a commercial shopping center perhaps. But not in the wild near spring grasses, in slow water, slow time. Not by a Chinese Temple, by vines and stone, or in a deep vein of the Yangtze.
Claude Monet painted Water Lilies in 1919, (see Chasingtailfeathers) a soft, faded print of living greens, and little yellow saucers catching light. The oil painting with small blotches of pink and blue sky takes me to places I've been in the wild - blissful places where and when I had the fortune to think of little less than how light plays through trees.
An interesting thought is how the painting was door to my own memories and experiences, but it wasn't my experiencing the place of the lily pads, and that place, that sense of reality - and I wondered what I was missing, and if I painted my relational - experiential feelings from other natural places, onto a place of lily pads, was I doing the place, or myself an injustice? What is there by a Japanese pond in the mountains, still near the drift of the sea, that I am not knowing purely, but associate and identify with through a feeling of enchantment when I linger on a Manet painting lily pads?
How do you know what is your past
what were real events and what is memory
constructed pieces or actual remembering
such as how the light and spring sunshine
wheeled these precise dust particles
into a Saturday morning (or was it Sunday)
lying on the floorboards with your brothers
making up stories until noon
Regarding Monet, I think how remarkable painters are to capture an essence in nature, and I wonder if abundance of digital photography dilutes the value of a painting. Â I Â think how an artist uses techniques to impress mood into a painting - that the reality shifts through the eyes of the painter, and again through the representation of that vision. A painting is then of a place, but also a reflection of the painter's view.
Anna's memories are neither true nor false - and she knows it's not important if it were Saturday or Sunday. It only matters that she could grasp the dust particles floating in a still light, that she could see, know and feel them. Â And for her, that light channels to a memory / experience with brothers, an essence of the joy of childhood, and one of the multiple facets of love in the world. Â
 And we are all reconstructing memory, redefining what we see of it, through our distorted associations, that also tend to be what we we wish them to be, and perhaps, need them to be. But at some point, the one's we knew, were pure and golden, in themselves - especially as children, before we got into the practice of evaluating a moment. But with time, we get to sift back through it all, and laugh inside for the things that were so beautiful, but that which maybe we didn't yet have the concept to know how much so they were.Â
It only matters that we are lucky enough sometimes to sit and sift in that slow light, or that we could play without a care in the world.
And a picture cannot take the place of the place itself, in my mind anyway, - because, among other things, it's detached from all the other senses, and loses it's essence of place - and instead becomes representative of places, ideals, and memories we already know. So to me, a Manet of lily pads is in some ways more real than a picture, because it's imbued artistically with a quality or filter of emotional conveyance, and associates a nexus of feelings that visiting an actual place might likely lead us. Thus we are inspired to lean toward the emotional and relational content of a place, because it tends to leave us centered in the purest things about life - even as simple as the dust particle light on the Sunday floorboards, and any opportunity towards timelessness, like floating through adventures with sisters and brothers.Â
