positano. going back- inside

What is left but memory to recreate that niche in the Italian coast, its cobbled corridors and alley's, roofed with spindling, leafy vines, that held my life for a moment in dreamy stasis. I took no pictures there, nor bought any trinkets or took any artifact that now endures. Even those gorgeous, horribly uncomfortable sandals I bought to replace my busted sneakers are a mere memory- one whose beginning I cannot trace. When did I loose the thing? When did its shape and weight on my foot transform into a feeling, and image only?

Five years removed from what I sometimes now believe really was the dream it felt, Positano is more a harbor in my imagination than reality. The place itself like its people- whose faces long ago melted- has at turns gradually dissolved, shifted shapes, grown more beautiful, or a times, more ghostly; it is as much feeling and image as the sandals whose place among my possessions is in my mind only. In reflection, I wonder if there is something to be said of those cheap tourist t-shirts and countless pictures of sun-touched tourists smiling in front of some local novelty. At least through these- these things- you can pretend to own a piece of what you really only pass through momentarily on your way to somewhere else. But it is pretense only, isn't it? What is the souvenir but a shred of "evidence" you hold up to remind yourself and others that this place, and you occupation of it, your memory, your story is real. “See, I really did walk the streets of Positano, and touch the sand where the street bleed away into the blue water. I really did taste the salt on my fingers and hear the laugh of richly olive-complected children at play in the drift near by. See, my photo? My shirt? See the evidence?”

The truth is even evidence fails to say anything of the reality of the place you dwelt within. It is only piece, sometimes- as with those t-shirts- a manufactured symbol, that signifies nothing of the local, only the novelty. What I mean is, the trinket- if we will call it that- is a symbol of a place manufactured for a foreigner, intended to be taken away. It has no real connection to the earth, the sound, the energy of the geographic space it was taken from. An artifact, that is a piece of the space (like a rock or pressed flower) is perhaps more closely linked to its source, but it too- once it is taken out of its context- becomes a symbol for the taker, it’s meaning and use permanently altered to suit a new context (that of memory). It is cut from the heart, from its source, and it alone can never recreate the wholeness of the space from which it was pulled. But, unlike the t-shirt or photo, I think it might perhaps retain the spirit of its origin, like a ghost hanging on. Can’t you feel sometimes? When you hold a piece of a place you went that you took home with you, can’t you feel its origin pulse lightly, can’t you feel a sense of the wholeness of which it was once a part? And it there was a wholeness, from which you took a part what happens to that wholeness? It can never be whole- not completely, once it is taken from. Do you feel then, a sense of what you’ve stolen? Do you feel the ghost of what has been broken, sulking somewhere at the periphery of your consciousness? And when the thing looses its potency for you- when it’s symbolical meaning, the meaning you, the tourist, designated to it- and you pack it away in some attic box or toss it out with the trash on a whim of tidiness do you feel anything?

What troubles me further is memory, especially when memory alone is what you take from a place. To think of it, memory seems part manufactured and part truly connected to that wholeness you were a part of once- maybe a foreign part, but still somehow a part of. It seems part tourist t-shirt, part artifact. What do I mean by that? I guess, I mean that memory is in some ways a production, forever in a state of production. As with my vision of Positano, memory is colored by our heart, and desire. Memory is a paper crane, a production created to mean something, to symbolize something. Memory is not a photograph. By that I mean it is not fixed as a single vision, printed forever, unchangeable, but true both photograph and memory are subject to interpretation, and desire. That is, both shift slightly, sometimes dramatically, depending on the way one wants to perceive something- be it an image framed behind a glass screen or the floating images that change color with the weather of our imaginations, and emotions. But memory is also, still I think connected in some very real way to the origin of its creation. That is, if we are still talking about the memory of a visit taken to a geographic reality. The reason I suggest that there is something potent, and connected to the origin of the traveler’s memory of a place is this idea I have that when you create a memory from a lived experience, you take elements of the “remembered” in to your self. The scent, the sound, the weight of the air, the light of the hour, the feel of the crowd or the sand or the living creature at your fingers, as parts of the cognitive processes that are involved in the moment of perception and the creation of a memory imprint themselves on you. They are translated if you will into the chemicals that as much as they will make up your sense of a place when it’s gone, also make up a part of you. You see, so I think (unless I’m wildly off my rocker) there might be something- I hesitate to use this word, but pure or original about a traveler’s memory, as much as it is fallible and shifting, and produced. Maybe, when you come from your travels, with artifacts or with nothing but the imprint of a place (or places) on your memory, you return with these things inside you- as part of you. And maybe in these things, as much as they are cut from their original context, and given new context in you, retain some of that original wholeness of which they were a part.

The place becomes a harbor in your imagination, uprooted from its geographic certainty, drifting within you as a sight for endless recreation. The place becomes a reflection of you, of you remembering, or you (re)remembering a memory of you in a place that is no longer significant because it is a place, but because it is a part of you. Positano was but two days in my life, too sensation-rich, visually stunning, days of my life that I expand and contract according to my place and situation at the moment of remembering, for as long as I remember, and recreate it in me. In a way I think, my location at a given moment of memory has become more important that the location I remember. How have I blurred the lines between my self and this place? How have I recreated that cascading city and its brilliant harbor? Sometimes, the place becomes so gigantic; it expands out and envelops me again. What were vague impressions have at times become gigantic in my memory- the smell of the ocean actually tints the flavor on my tongue and the sunlight filtering through that vine-covered alley shines golden on the backs of my eyes. And yet, there have been years, during which time I failed to practice that all preserving- all distorting- action of re-creative remembering, so that the place shrank, grayed and became a ghost, looming at the rim of my mind. And I think it would be this way, even if I had those sandals still, to remind me. Even if I could still lace their thin leather straps up the length of my calves, and feel my weight settle on the thin leather sole I would have to travel back within myself to that niche in the coastline of my memory, to conjure and recreate (again) the place, the feeling, the moment that wearing them signifies. I suppose that’s it, when you come back with your trinkets, artifacts, or maybe only memories you always come back with nothing, except that which through some strange magic you might endeavor to recreate.