A Meditation on Summer’s End: Memory in Art
My earliest memories of summer can be traced back to days at the beach, white sand burning my bare feet, scents of pizza by the slice and zeppoles fresh out of the fryer coating the air. They can be traced back to evenings lying in the grass of my backyard, waiting for the fireflies to light up the blackness of night. Memories are funny like this, I find, when reflecting on my younger days. There doesn’t seem to be one specific moment, but a thin, nonlinear line connecting moments to what I find to be, just a feeling. It comes over me when a seagull cries in flight while watching the sun set into the Gulf. And again, when the honeysuckle and frangipani blooms, their sweet scents filling my mornings. When we think of memory, and we so often do, we are thrust into the complexities of truth. What happened? Did it happen to me or was I there? And is what I remember, what had actually happened or exaggerated?
Memory is at the forefront of love, joy, and also suffering. All of these a part of the evolving and complex human condition that we see, invariably, in all art forms. The Earth itself reflects the human condition back to us, in the rage of burning fires, the cleansing thereafter. The soil, the burnt trunks, the land remembers and is then born again, alive. In a thunderstorm’s beckoning of powerful deployments of rain, in the reckoning of crashing ocean waves. The sea remembers, bringing suffering in a storm’s destruction, and again, in the joy of a young girl running into the calm wavelets in a New Jersey summer. The brute force of nature requires us to reminisce, to recognize our flaws and our strengths. It requires us to hold up a mirror to our past and our present, to prepare us for what is to come.
Remembrance is not foreign to us. We turn to express it through our bodies, our words, and our art. As we bid goodbye to summer once more and welcome the autumn season, we will relish in the fact that Florida will be flowered with days below 80 degrees. When February rolls in, we will think back fondly on the times last summer spent at the beach, or in the parks, how lively and green the trees were. We won’t remember the unbearable heat, nor the sunburn from that one bad week in June. We will simply look forward to the love and the joy that summertime brings us.
And so, I bring forth again these complexities of truth. I implore you to experiment with your own memory in the observation of a painting you are called to at the museum, or in the song that raises the hairs on your arms. Look to the photo framed and lit beneath curated lights and ask if you see yourself there, now or in another time. Perhaps, the artist, the artist in you, are asking to reach inside and extract a moment from the past to bring to the forefront, for it is just as prevalent in your life now as it is.
As I prepare to lean into autumn, I will think back with joy on what those of us in New Jersey called local summers, when the tourists retreated and we got to experience the dissipation of summer heat on empty beaches. As fluid as an incoming wave, I treat remembrance as it should be treated, ebbing and flowing in and out of my mind and onto the page. Autumn in Florida, a transitional time for the magnolia tree outside my kitchen window, will be a season for leaning into recollection.
Over the next few issues, we have a wonderful interview lined up with St. Petersburg Press, local authors, and of course, more poetry.
Take the time, this summer’s end, to find that escape, be it a park, the beach, or your backyard. Most importantly, take the time to enjoy it. •
