pearls

My lost memories came back. All of them, in a whooshing rush of images and time sequences. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect to ever know them again.

As with everything that happens to me mentally these days, these memories, too, seemed to be linked to a single binding symbol that anchored them into my brain. Early yesterday I had been looking for a pair of earrings, which I had been quite certain I’d left on top of my chest of drawers. And as I’d looked, I’d remembered that actually there had been other jewelry there too, because that’s where I keep it, and that in fact I had been working on making a set of pearl earrings and a pearl necklace to go with them in the weeks and months preceding my surgery.

There had also been a set of pearl studs, very elegantly mounted over a single diamond. I realized, remembering them at that moment, that I had not seen—nor thought of them--in years. The earrings had been a gift from a boyfriend—not just any boyfriend, but someone who had profoundly altered the course of my life and who, probably more than anyone else in the world, shaped the path my career would take in academia. It was because of our many conversations about literature and teaching that I chose medieval as a primary scholarly focus and that I decided to move to Washington—with him--to attend graduate school. We’d planned to get married. We’d even set a date.

But that was a very long time ago.

It was so long ago that I hadn’t thought about these things in years, until yesterday. Standing in my closet last night, after an evening of reading old stories I’d forgotten about and planning new courses around my new ideas about the forms and shapes of knowledge—Visionary Literature, Embodying Literature, courses that would involve old works like Tom O’Bedlam and Childe Roland--I gazed up and saw a crystal globe bookend standing on a shelf, which I’d bought a few months back because I thought it was so beautiful. And next to it was a little jewelry box, and I knew instantly what it was. It was what I had been looking for all along. In it was my strand of pearls—the strand given to me by my parents when I was eighteen. And next to them were the pearls with the diamond studs.

And suddenly everything else came back, too—in a surge of images and patterns that make sense only to the person whose life is governed by them. Everything came flooding back. I knew where everything was, where everything was that I had misplaced in those weeks and days before my diagnosis—both physical items and mental ones. I knew again what I had been doing before my breakdown, what I had been planning. I knew where I was going now. It was those pearls—moonlike and white and perfect, next to those perfect crystal globes—that triggered the return of the memories.

But the strangest feeling was watching them all come back. I was frozen—mesmerized—while I stood there and the memories ran right past my eyes. It was like watching a film of myself—maybe one of the original surrealist, avant-garde films by Bunuel or Dali.

And now I have a new metaphor for the mind—the pearl, the perfect orb, with its moonlike surface and its perfect intactness. Crack it open and it peels away in layers—each one paper-thin, slightly modulated, and fitting back together again like a little puzzle….as long as you don’t squeeze too hard and crumble off the edges.

You have to be careful about brains, you know. What was it Dan Quayle once said? "It's a terrible thing to lose one's mind...how true that is."

Well hey--he was right. I know all about it.