A Careening Roller Coaster Through My Head, My Memory, and Kitchens I Have Known

[catvalente]

The mind is a strange thing. I cannot even say if it's the mind of a writer that I mean, or the mind of a human. I have always had the mind I have; it is impossible to say whether my habits conform to those of any group--writers, women, those of an age neither Generation X nor Millennial, Americans, artists, and so on--or whether it is just the

Comments

[ladymondegreen]

I have many similar amalgam houses in my brain, but then, I also have the "walk through like a VR" and the "disquietingly recall childhood conversations" thing, so it's not all that surprising. We may have similar brains.

Also, I'd love to hear your ending for Purple Rose of Cairo. That film affected me on a profound enough level that I watched it something like five times in a row before I could really process it.

[murasaki_1966]

So lovely to have you posting here again. I've missed your elegant, intelligent posts.

140 characters just doesn't work for me.

[ext_945914]

Firstly: this piece is beautiful, as always, and explains something important (to me, at least) about the way you write.

Secondly: I do something similar in terms of visualising places that I'm writing about, but not with quite the same degree of mythomnemic entanglement. (I realise even as I type that sentence that mythomnemic isn't a real word, but I'm making it one, goddammit, because the mythology of memory is a THING that Requires Description.) There are places in my fantasy settings - secondary world stuff, not based on anything modern or personally familiar at all - that I can picture and experience in tactile, sensory detail, and which I initially always view from a particular set of imaginary-camera angles. Which leaves me struggling to resist overdescription: it doesn't actually matter, in most cases, what colour the stone is in that one room, or the shape of the rug or the way the window balances the standing mirror opposite, but I can see it so clearly that I feel obliged to convey the right level of detail.

[alexmegami]

When I imagine them, all apartments are my father's apartment from when I was ~3-13; small houses are my grandmother's house. Decor may change, along with slight architectural changes (in one case, rather than looking out a window, my father's solarium instead opens out onto the pool deck from that apartment building); but they're always the bones of those places.

I think schools are my middle school.

[pameladean]

I think this may be more normal than might seem reasonable. I too have a basic kitchen, bathroom, back yard, front porch, classroom, wooded path, and so on. The majority of them are from when I was about the age you were when you were in your kitchen, though in some cases the pattern has been overwritten by later places, most notably the classroom and the wooded path. So if I think of one of those things, there's an immediately present room or path, and behind it somehow is the original one, which I can conjure up if I want it.

P.