Storms in My Head

It was one of the people that Dr. Freud wrote about who talked about having "storms in her head." Houses may or may not be haunted but the minds of Members of Clan Anthropos are occupied with no shortage of ghosts. This weekend, M and I watched three movies ... all about haunting memories ....

Brickman and Allen's Annie Hall
A Spanish Film: City without Limits
An Indy-Israeli Documentary Film: The Flat

Thinking just of these films where a neurotic New Yorker has to deal with loss -- in a sense, all memory is about things-lost -- of a lover and, in the latter two films, where adult children work, after a death of a keeper of secrets and memories dies, to uncloak ghosts of their ancestors' experience ... in one, memories relating to the Spanish Civil War, and, in the other, memories of the Holocaust of WWII.

Linkings ...

Memories, Secrets, Loss and the ability to produce Narratives are all part of the equipment of humankind. It was the same weekend that an Internet collocutor sends a hyperlink to Odetta's Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child. Listening to the first couple of bars of Odetta singing immediately kindled both Odetta's version and Paul Robeson's.  The mere mention of the Woody Allen/Marshall Brickman film set off memories for a dear friend of ours ... telling us of how ashamed we should be for owning a copy of one of Woody Allen's films. The Spanish Film set ablaze memories of my Grandmother lighting tables full of candles to keep the memory of all of her relatives who had been slaughtered. As that memory fired, I began thinking of the generations who would remember all the recent massacres ... in Iran and Iraq during their war ... in Syria ... in a half-dozen African countries ... in Serbia ... in Armenia ... in Hungary and Poland and the Ukraine .... in Stalin's Russia and in Mao's China. Memories flood .... chain ... couple ... overtake the mind.

I suppose it was in an attempt to bind these memories that I became stuck on a song that I occasionally may have thought of in the past 50+ years ... a meditative and haunting song ... "The breath is Yours ... and its body is Yours ... Have mercy, please have mercy on Your handiwork."

The haunting melody came to me after the Spanish Film on the way to have dinner with M and my friend and his wife who hates Woody Allen because of what she remembers about him. I drove singing it ... I walked about the house singing it and humming it ... M had to remind me that toning it down -- just a hair -- might permit other voices to be heard ... I woke up and was humming it in the middle of the night ... and then in the morning? it was there, once again.

I remember (there it goes, again) using Tiger Balm for headaches 40+ years ago. An Old Vietnamese remedy ... mostly camphor, I seem to recall ... a spot placed in the middle of the forehead to move the focus of the pain from the vascular system to the skin. Memories ... Storms in my Head ... maybe are arranged in such a manner as to cover collections of more painful memories. They same Doctor from Vienna called these "Screen Memories" .... for me? I suspect I'll sing that song in my head for many days until some of the more painful memories have flown away ... "like a dream flies away."

Two of our grandchildren from far away will be arriving later, today, and will help drive some of these storms offshore ... the storms will begin their orbit around the Seven Seas and -- I have no doubt of this -- will return.