Tasting the Words

I really enjoyed Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller. In fact, it has been my favorite text of this course. For some reason she grabbed my attention with the dedication, "...dedicated to the storytellers...and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them" and kept me captivated through the final photograph. It was the visual representation of her memories (memories which include stories) through the photographs that drew me in. After all, what is a photograph album other than a pictorial history or story of life. A history that Silko so skillfully and gracefully captured and shaped into a narrative of her people. She writes, "...the photographs in the Hopi basket have a special relationship to the stories as I remember them."

I've contemplated at great length the degree to which I remember my childhood (as I remember it) and it troubles or perhaps comforts me that the only definite stories/images/experiences I recall stem directly from a picture in my parent's photo album. For example, the clothes I remember vividly, the fish in a bucket, or the specific examples of popular culture are all images which have been trapped photographically--a neon pink tank top, a catfish in a shallow tin tub, or Mt. Dew's original aluminum can design--and with these images come further, deeper memories, emotions, and stories--the reason we took the picture in the first place. This troubles me in a sense that I have become (and perhaps modern society has as well) too dependent on visual stimulation and rely solely on visual evidence as "truth". While I acknowledge the fact of the images in the photographs I must also acknowledge the fish that didn't get their pictures taken and the fluidity of a wardrobe as articles flow in as often as they drift out. What I'm saying is, there are some things I simply do not remember, and others that are etched into my memory forever. It troubles me to know that certain times, ideas, and feelings I've experienced in life have gone forgotten--and the things I do remember and can still "picture in my head" are those which still exist today, trapped forever, in a picture. Here is where I panic and become grateful for the photographic images and comforted by the visual fact of memory, history, and story. Now I feel comforted by these few images I do have and grateful for the sense of rootedness (not sure if it's a word) and beginning received by them.

I begin to wonder if I would remember any of these specifics without my parent's photo album. Common sense tells me I would--after all, a blind man does have memory and recollection. Yet, I'm starting to toy with the idea that I really wouldn't remember the specifics without pictures-at least not in the same way or even the same specifics. What I'm saying is that memories, stories, emotions, ect. are experienced, absorbed, lived through all of our senses. When pictures weren't available, stories were told. Before language was achieved, physical contact showed the way. What ever the medium, what ever the message or story, communication is impossible without an appeal to one of our five senses. For example, if I didn't have the visual story of a catfish in a shallow tin tub, I would still have the essential story or memory through a different sense. Instead of the picture of a fish it may be the swampy smell of Wisconsin in spring or the sensation of mud oozing over my shoes that recalls that essential story--that feeling or emotion that tells the history, cues the story. This particular cue being a picture of a catfish and this particular story being the relationship between a father and a daughter. This particular story being an actual emotion, bond, experience that is rather indescribable and untranslatable--the very thing literature and poetry is about.

So, many different mediums appealing to the array of our human senses provide us with limitless opportunities to express, convey, and tell the exact same story or experience. In other words, while it is a picture of a catfish that makes me feel a part of my dad it could be the smell of old spice that does it for my sister. Completely different mediums, different senses, yet the exact same indescribable, untranslatable story.

To get right down to it, it is possible to have a interpretation/ re-presentation / translation of a once oral story, idea, emotion through a medium which appeals to taste or touch. I'm thinking poprocks as vocabals--anyone up to the challenge?