sensory memory..

in cat's eye, which we read for english a-level, she has this whole theory that we remember through smells...

when chez vino a few nights back, i had a cup of chai...i haven't had one since heald place...and before i knew it, as i stood outside their barn door, having a little smoke and enjoying my chai, i was transported, after a split-second of shutting my eyes, to that big, dirty, roomy, draughty, cluttered, newspaper-strewn, love-filled kitchen.....and to iain, and kates, and a thousand crosswords not finished, and to experimental cooking, and library books everywhere, and reluctant jazz and it was so, so vivid....

the smell of tents does the exact same thing to me.......i remember such vivid things of summers spent in tents....strong feelings, wordless ones, at that........fancing a boy, fearing my fat, being told about periods, being bored out of my mind with hanging out with my family, stuff of endless twelve-year-old summers....

in microserfs, when dan and karla are a few months into their fledgling relationship, and they start practising their shiatsu skills on each other, karla tells him about her theory, of how we store memories in different parts of our bodies....she'd go for his lower back, and suddenly he'd be crying...unconsciously re-living some childhood sadness....the left foot, and out of nowhere he'd feel about seven years old....

me, i wear my lovely new boots and walk along, en route to work, and am cast back to three years ago.....when i had similar boots (they turned out to be rubbish..these, however, shall be lovely for a long time...) but they make a similar sound, the inner-lining feels the same as that other pair...and so i'm cast back....a split-second of closed-eyes and i'm in cheltenham, walking from the turkish lunch place back to work, another stamp on my card, another box of falafel and salad ready for eating, another tedious afternoon of working for fat george and the mindless aims of the facilities department...a snapshot of the time i first had those boots........

the other day i had a cherry muffin, and i was memoretically moved instantly back to the same sort of time, those nine months of taking the 94 bus over from gloucester to cheltenham, stopping off at this horrid but hilarious (minging-)-coffee place on the way from the bus to work, even though it invariably made me even more late than the A40 had already done, and the really fat, very camp old guy who worked the counter there, where they sold the exact same muffins made by the same company, same packaging, as i found in one of the shops on oldham street the other morning......and i tasted the cold springtime of 2005 in one bite......

and when i hear even a few seconds of any song from the takk.. album by sigur ros, i am thrown into a momentary seizure of excitement/fear/purpose/waiting/lusting/and eventual resultant sadness, as it takes me to this time last year, the jt/valentine/history of love saga.......


and with none of these examples is it a slight or inconsequential meeting of then and now, it stirs me everytime, i guess its what the word -evocative- is for....but when one sense recalls the memory, the other four, plus heart = a second or a minute of almost being there, then, almost being who i was then, almost wanting what i wanted then, or almost dreading what i then dreaded.....bodies are amazing things, but memory...man, that's something else...