A try to lick the melted memory

  

 

“The heart's memory eliminates the bad and manifests the good”

No need to mention the brain behind the words, the man who celebrated memories, Gabo

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez). For Gabo, memory is a funnel which purifies our experiences. A mirror which reflects ourselves, a spectacle through which only the 'good' turns visible. It's really desirable for those who crave to erase the past in order to enhance the present. Everyone likes to decorate the shelter of memories with beautiful flowers, not with hurting nails. Even if we pass our memories through the distilling tunnel to satisfy the emotional requirements of the moment, it remains as an eternal truth. Elimination does not mean disintegration. The memory persists, on a stage beyond all the subjective realities.

Salvador Dali the surrealist, in his artwork, the persistence of memory, made a great declaration to the human mind, regarding the perpetual identity that the memory possesses. The picture has been subjected to wonderful interpretations world over. I am not trying  to interpret such a great art piece, just sharing my experience while observing this masterpiece work.

The picture was painted in 1931 by the brilliant madman, Salvador Dali. I came to know that the scene portrayed a Catalonian landscape which was very much nostalgic for Dali who had spent his childhood in Spain. But for me, it seems to be  a disturbing atmosphere, dry ,hard and of course, completely alien. I wonder why memory chose to persist in such a lonely place and I guess, our mind might also resemble such a terrible land, hard to sustain. The memories might have taken refuge in a similar dreadful land where neither the emotion, logic nor demands arrive to disturb.

The interpreters opined that it's a dream land where ordinary objects are juxtaposed and deformed in a bizarre fashion. But I do smell nothing unreal in the land. Because Dali himself has revealed that he used to employ a paranoiac critical method, which cultivates self induced psychotic hallucinations in order to create art. He is creating a different kind of reality where hallucinations and intuitions act as the sensors of reality and it may feel unreal for those who observe the unexperienced as untruth.

The melting watches successfully deceive the image of time. In my opinion, a watch represents time, but a watch in work has something different to say. Memories are time with a value imposed. And a working clock is also the image where a value has been imposed. A working clock is a quantitative measurement of an abstract concept called time. Memories are also a scale of measurement of another abstract idea, mind. The surrealist who replaces rationality with a greater reality of the human subconscious definitely has a far greater idea to unveil.

An interpreter observed that the shadow of the fly on the clock  is similar to that of man. And I find it quite interesting because it's a perfect metaphor to convey the minuscule position of the man who peeps into the memory, where memory acts as a working clock and man is even unable to view the clock fully in a single sight.

There exist divergent observations regarding the creature depicted in the center of the picture. A large group of commentators view it as a symbolisation of the uncertainty of a figure we see in a dream, while another group interpreted it as a closed eyelid. In my perception, the figure seems to be a perfect blend of both these ideas. When we witness a dream, our eyelids are closed and our psychological identity undergoes a kind of deformation.In the dream world we release the burden of our physical body and we find ourselves positioned on an unfamiliar identity. The memory persists upon that strange garment too.

On the left side of the image an army of ants are picturised upon a clock. The artworld views those ants as symbols of decay. Personally this image in particular, felt contradictory to the words of gabo. Here ants are placed upon a clock with the color of caramel. I think it is the depiction of degeneration of our sweet and fond memories. Completely opposite to Gabo’s observation of manifestation of good memories, Dali might have suggested the disappearance of pleasant memories by the course of time.

The most interesting part I found in the picture is its systematic form of presentation. The paranoiac critical method is a try to systematize confusion. So this image also follows a systematic tabulation of ideas. There are two plains on the image. An uplifted one on which the bough, clock with a fly and the clock with ants are placed. The deformed creature is placed on ground level. The bough with no leaves reminds us of the past, the fly with human shadow symbolises man’s observation of the present moment and ants come out as a reminder of the inevitable destiny awaiting for all happy events. That is, they represent past, present and future respectively. This sequence is placed on an uplifted plain called  real life. The existence of the deformed creature is on a land of dreams which is not at all a regular terrain (the creature lies on an undulated rocky surface). Because the sense organs of dreams are highly delicate ,independent and unmalleable as compared to the sense organs of reality. The tense of the event matters only in the plain of life, not in the dream. What matters there is only the form of manifestation of identity. And it's really important to remember that the plain of real life has built its foundation upon the plain of dream.

There are many more images to be observed thoroughly and they all provide us novel psychic realisations. Let all these realizations equip us to witness the world of real with a different perspective.