“Remembering…is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past.” —Endel Tulving

my grandparents, in the foreground, at a party

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We celebrated my grandmother’s 80th birthday this weekend, and as we drove into Salem, the open fields and tiny road-side diners took me back, as they always do, to a different time.

It’s my belief that our memories are inextricably linked to places, and that pulling up those memories requires travelling a landscape, rendering the world of that memory.

But I also believe that the human face is its own landscape (something Sergio Leone demonstrated in his films), and so, the sudden appearance of a loved one can also trigger a world of memories. It’s something I’m exploring in the new book, but experienced yesterday firsthand, with all my siblings in one place for the first time in years.

Not only did my old memories come back to me, new memories came back as well. Moments flickered on the edges of my sight that never happened. A life that was never lived. It was something like the opposite of deja vu: what I was seeing in front of me triggered memories that had never existed.

I first encountered this phenomenon in a similar situation: a few years ago my dad and I spent a week in Florida with my brother Nick. It was the most time we’d ever spent together, and as the week went on, like yesterday, I suddenly became aware of a life that could’ve been: a life where we all sat on a back porch after dinner, telling jokes and smoking cigars or something. Were these images uncovering this desire I’ve always had to be closer to my brothers? Or was the desire uncovering these images—this hidden world inside my head that never happened?

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rough sketches of my great-grandfather Sponseller, done from slides

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Chris Ware says of his drawing style:

I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I “draw,” which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world….I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

Researchers suggest that we don’t experience déjà vu until the ages of 8 or 9, that up until that point, we simply don’t have the brain development to describe or experience it. But what if, up until that time, we are simply seeing the world for what it is? What if we have no coding or simplifying system or access to a back catalog of images to make the experience possible? As we become older and older, déjà vu experiences become increasingly more common, and especially when we are tired of stressed. When we’re not seeing.

In this article I was reading in the NYTimes yesterday, “Déjà Vu, Again and Again”, there were people who insisted that everything they were experiencing had already happened. Some wires in their brains went screwy, some circuits got crossed, and they stopped seeing new things. Everything had been done. And so they did wacky things like “the woman who turned in her library card because she felt she’d read everything on the shelves.”

My aunt found a bunch of shoeboxes full of beautiful old color slides, so she got a projector, and after the party we all sat in Grandma’s darkened living room, and images of our ancestors flashed on the wall. My dad pointed to faces with a yardstick and told all the stories he knew.

And as the slides passed, looking at these vivid projected colors, I felt the exact opposite of those old folks with the screwy wiring. I felt like nothing had been done. Everything was new. My youth was pulsing, and there were a million lives left to live. A million unknown memories waiting to be visited.

The book I’m working on includes a kind of memory plot: the main character retrieves his lost memories by retracing his steps, moving through the geographical spaces of his past.

This idea is nothing new: pretty much every character who goes through some kind of trauma in literature deals with it by retracing his steps. Telling his story. Beginning with Odysseus, and more recently, Eternal Sunshine, Memento, Time’s Arrow, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. These great stories do exactly what they’re supposed to: not only do they give us a map and take us on a journey, they give us a new way of mapping our own lives. (I remember stumbling out of the theater after watching Memento, barely able to read the street signs.)

So this morning I’m reading the good ol’ Science Times, and I get another shocker: according to a recent article published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, “the speakers of Aymara, an Indian language of the high Andes, think of time differently than just about everyone else in the world. They see the future as behind them and the past ahead of them.”

It seems that humans began conflating time and space long before Einstein ever picked up a piece of chalk. Instead of equations, however, we use what are called conceptual metaphors, in which space sits in for time.

Most of us describe the future as ahead or in front of us, and the past as behind us. Until the view of the Aymara speakers was deconstructed, no significant exceptions to this way of thinking about time had been demonstrated….

…the Aymara call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning back or behind time, and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning front time. And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future.

…the Aymara speakers see the difference between what is known and not known as paramount, and what is known is what you see in front of you, with your own eyes.

The past is known, so it lies ahead of you. (Nayra, or “past,” literally means eye and sight, as well as front.) The future is unknown, so it lies behind you, where you can’t see.

Well, this really blew my mind, and has obvious implications for the story I’m trying to tell. If the future is behind us, and the past up ahead, do we back away from the past, trying to edge closer to the future, but still blind to it? Or do we try to put the past behind us, and are therefore doomed to bump into it in our quest to make it into the future?

I think it also has something to do with comics, another “conceptual metaphor…in which space sits in for time”:

page from REINVENTING COMICS, quoted by Dylan Horrocks

Of course, Dylan Horrocks and James Kochalka toss this theory on its head: comics don’t just spacially represent time, “comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.”

I’m not sure where my thoughts are headed at this point, but how curious to me that we must map time in order to conceptualize it. That we all seem to be cartographers, trying to map our worlds…