They had taken photographs of each other almost all of the time- immediately reading this line, I paint an image of white sand, tough by the coral and ridges produced by frequent runners….Runners in love, runners that frolicked during happier times. It is them, the divorced couple, that protrudes through my mind. This was my beginning lexia- this was my first time coupling and meddling with the text.
The sea is amazing, not too far off to exclude the dreamer or the wanderer, but distant enough to attract us.
I wander, naturally to this word “sea”. “…and, almost always, there is the sea—or what the sound gives us of the sea—in the distance. It took the place of perspective for us, benign and ever changing.”
A relationship, the writer and his affinity, his struggle and disgruntled relationship with the sea, foretells the relationship he has with his memory- memories of his wife, their love, like the dreamlike escape of happier times on the beach.
A photograph should have captured such a time, but was it real? Was it genuine? The meaning of one PLACE appears relevant to this particular lexia- its meaning to an individual, and the apparent frustration it has as it correlates with the temperament of one memory.
I click on PLACE, and am taken to another location entirely. He is romantic. Romanticizing the faint pictures of his love life, tainted by salty relations, much like the cold water that soaked his very toes against the shores of a distant beach. He wishes to have gone back to that love- that memory of conversing happily with a beach- what should have been, was not. Or so was it? It is sad. I am sorry for him. “No matter how scrutinized these pictures now I cannot find the truth,” (from the previous lexia). The truth of his marriage is faulty, washing back and forth like the crashing waves on a shore- it was here, and now it is gone.
The faded memory dances off his heart, playing with his emotions. For that reason, I click on DANCERS.
Though not of much significance, I was brought to another location. “There isn’t any story here. It’s as Tolstoy said, the genuine drama occurs on the upward or downward slopes, never at the apex. The controlling myth of her marriage was Snow White.”
So it’s settled- his marriage was a myth- not an ounce of truth, only what his memory or imagination allowed. The term dancer and place all form a network of interpretations of the text- One that can almost be formed into a sentence: His memory of a particular place danced in his head much like the graceful yet made-up dancers of a nutcracker production- it was ALL a production; soon, he finds that the truth of this memory is merely a myth. (the term myth having linked me to “Even so, as manufactured myths go, this one is accurate.”…. All of the terms (place, dancers, myth) and the texts that follow compose a story of faded love, past memories, questioning truth, and remembered images.