Prompt 221. Things That I Remember

& a prompt on the power of montage by Jessie Creel

Hi friend,

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about memories, about what sticks with us as time passes, and why. The last few weeks, Jon’s seven-year-old nephew Brennan was visiting, and I got to see everything through his eyes. Watching him, I kept thinking about the Pixar film Inside Out, which has a lovely opening sequence about memories—how in the mind of the main character, a little girl named Riley, a new experience provokes a feeling, like joy, sadness, or fear. That feeling coalesces into a glowing glass orb, which is shuttled onto shelves beside other memories that line the wall like library stacks. A very few special memories are stored in a case in the middle of the room: they’re her core memories, which come to define her.

So memory has been on my mind because of Brennan, as I wonder which of these memories will stick with him, and what effect things like last week’s state dinner at the White House might have on his life. But I’ve also been struggling with my memory. Time when you’re sick feels like a perpetual waiting room, where the lights are too bright, and the temperature is all wrong, and the minutes are excruciatingly slow—yet somehow the days blur by in an undistinguished mass. I’m not sure if it’s the transplant-induced fatigue, or chemo brain fog, or the fact that, to manage my GVHD symptoms, I’ve been smoking a fair amount of pot. (Likely it’s all of the above.) But what I do know is that I’ve gone from being married to my Google calendar to never knowing the day of the week, and from writing in a journal every day to process and collect meaningful moments, to lugging it from room to room, unable to crack the spine. All of this makes me wonder, how will this time be recorded in my memory?

Recently The Paris Review published an interview with the novelist N. Scott Momaday, where he said something so simple and beautiful: “There are all kinds of things that I remember. I wish I could live them again.” When I thought about my memories through this lens, the moments that arose were simple. The first was a very distinct memory of lying on the couch in my East Village apartment with Oscar when he was a puppy, napping for the first time. Nothing really happened; it was just an ordinary moment we would share again and again and again.

Another is taking a walk with Jon early in our relationship, on the first warm spring day, the kind where everyone in the city turns out. I was wearing a wrap dress with a long tail, and the breeze was tossing it up, and I was dribbling a basketball as we walked up Avenue A. In the moment, it didn’t seem remarkable. (I don’t even have a picture of it—the wintry street scene above will have to stand in.) But the city was buzzing and alive and full of possibility, and I felt free. I was preparing to go on my road trip, I was falling in love, I felt pretty in my dress. After four hard years, I was sensing a shift: rather than dread, I felt excitement about what lay ahead, and that moment seemed to encapsulate the turn.

That’s what it feels like with so many of my core memories. It’s when you’re out for an ordinary walk, and a busker starts playing, and suddenly the sky shifts, and things make sense. There’s an alchemy to it, something beyond your control, something unexpected. I think that’s why so many New Year’s plans end in disappointment—because you can’t engineer the moment worth saving. You can try to. You can create conditions for them to be possible. But there’s a kind of magic in the meaningful moment, when a whole constellation of elements falls into place.

To return to the night of the state dinner and Scott Momaday’s quote, what comes to mind isn’t meeting interesting people, or the drama and decor of the White House itself. It was after we’d returned to the hotel, and I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and saw that Jon had drawn me a bath and laid out my favorite fuzzy socks. With that realization comes a kind of relief: we don’t have to contort ourselves to live some epic moment. What’s worth remembering is not on some mountaintop of experience. You don’t need special access to attain it. It’s a moment that, for whatever reason, meets you exactly where you are.

With all that in mind, I’ll move on to today’s prompt from Jessie Creel, a television and film producer—about memories and montage. It’s beautiful and powerful and also useful, helping shed light on what’s worth remembering and why.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some Items of Note—

• We’ve scheduled our next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers. It’ll be Sunday, December 18 from 1-2pm ET. That’s just a couple days before the winter solstice, so expect a meditative hour that considers the beauty and power of darkness. To mark your calendar, click here.

• Over at the Isolation Journals Chat, you can join us in our weekly ritual: our collective list of small joys. And if you haven’t heard the exciting news—it’s now available for Android users! Tap the button below to add your small joy to this week’s thread.

From Sergei Eisensteins’s Strike (1925)

Prompt 221. Eisenstein and Memory by Jessie Creel

When I started therapy a decade ago, my first homework assignment was to make a list of all of my life’s major moments. I was expecting kudos from my therapist for my impeccable handwriting and my detailed sentence structures, but a harsh reality smacked me in the face. Her sole observation? I only included negative moments from my life. Shit.

It was in that reckoning that I began to study gratitude. I got into loving-kindness meditation and journaling, listing ten things I was grateful for each day. It didn’t come easy. I was in the throes of infertility, and at times finding positivity felt like a chore. But I was desperate to feel better, so I kept at it. In time, I realized that triumphs and tribulations are foils for each other, and I developed a montage of hard and soft memories that anchored me—that helped me understand the beauty and truth in the writer Joseph Campbell’s words: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

I’ve long known the power of montage. Back in film school we studied Sergei Eisenstein, who was famous for throwing together a string of images at a swift pace, knowing that the viewer would assemble them into a narrative, which allowed him to explore bigger themes and ideas and to move the story along more efficiently. You may have heard Jack Johnson’s famous lyric alluding to this: “Maybe Eisenstein should just relax. Slow down everyone. You’re moving too fast. Frames can’t catch you when you’re moving like that.”

But montage can be quite useful for accessing themes in your own journey—like a visual meditation, where you take inventory of whatever sits just below the surface of the subconscious. If you love what you’re seeing, you can identify similar moments as they happen and double down on them. If you don’t, at least you know what’s pulling you under, and you can begin looking for ways to climb out.

When I first began reflecting back, my sequences were gloomy, like that first effort at therapy: all flashbacks to failed pregnancies and agonizing doctors’ appointments. But good ones welled up too, including the blissful moment of holding my brand new baby. And with time and reflection, in the harder scenes, I see myself at my strongest. I knew what mattered to me, and I had the faith to continue on.

Your prompt for the week:

Storyboard a montage of your life. Begin by reflecting on the big moments, and let your mind wander from there. Some of the most painful memories may pop up, along with some of the best and some of the silliest too. There will be themes and motifs that Hollywood’s best writers’ room couldn’t replicate.

If you’re feeling inspired, pick a song to accompany it.

If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

Today’s Contributor

Jessie Creel is a film and television producer. In addition to her love of storytelling, she serves on the board of Find Your Anchor, a grassroots suicide prevention organization, and the advisory board of Waves for Water, an NGO dedicated to providing clean drinking water around the world. A native Texan raised on the East Coast, Jessie has called California home for the last 15 years. She lives in San Clemente with her non-profit-ninja husband, three kids, and an unruly pup. 

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Excavating Memory, a video replay of our Studio Visit with the brilliant writer and teacher Dani Shapiro, where we talk about following the creative impulse and using the pen to make meaning of the past

• Carrying Complicated Grief, an installment of Dear Susu where I answer a broken-hearted mother’s question: “Can I destroy my daughter’s journals?”

• On Hiraeth, or the Longing for Place, our Notes from the Hatch, where we wrote about landscape as memory