Marcel Proust popped a madeleine into
his mouth, and that random event triggered a flashbulb memory (psychologist
David Pillemer’s term) that led to volumes of novelistic writing on the mind, memory, a lost past,
lost love, lost youth, writing we still read and reflect on a century later.
Obsessed with every flutter of imagery and every thought inside his restless mind, in his 3,200-page seven-part work, A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time in English, also known as Remembrance of Things Past) Proust mines his psyche as a model for his study of the human condition, employing a device he called "involuntary memory" to conjure up Combray, the idyllic village where he passed his childhood, as one of the central themes of the novel.
This type of
vivid description of place built from memory has been explored in the work of
psychologist David B. Pillemer. Pillemer notes that in their ‘flashbulb memory’
paper, Brown and Kulik (1977) hypothesized that “any event that is shocking and
judged to be highly important or consequential will be recorded initially in
sensory rather than narrative form (27).” Although flashbulb memories usually
are defined as traumatic memories, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy
(people of Kennedy’s generation can
recall where they were and what they were doing at the time of the shooting),
the routines of everyday life can provide the intensity of a highly charged
life event.
In his book Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah
Lehrer examines the relationship between neuroscience and the senses as they
are expressed in the arts. Drawing on numerous examples from the works of
Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman,
George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, and Marcel Proust, Lehrer argues that writers
and artists and musicians who whole-heartedly gave themselves up to their creative process discovered information about how our
brains function centuries before the work of neuroscientists scientifically
confirmed their findings. Lehrer, through a careful analysis of the connection
between neuroscience and Proust’s novels, has concluded that Proust too made
important neurological discoveries a century before the science to prove his
discoveries caught up with him. In his chapter on Proust, "The
Method of Memory,"
Lehrer makes the following observation based on the famous madeleine passage
from the "Overture": “What
did Proust learn from these prophetic crumbs of sugar, flour, and butter? He
actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain. In 1911, the year of
the madeleine, physiologists had no idea how the senses connected inside the
skull. One of Proust’s deep insights was that our senses of smell and taste
bear a unique burden of memory." (80).
Lehrer’s
insights on the connections between the findings of neuroscience and the
working of Proust’s mind, in particular his discovery of how lost worlds could
be rediscovered through taste, inspired me to recreate the madeleine experience
under a controlled setting with groups of Lithuanian language and literature
teachers participating in writing
workshops. Initially I did not reveal to the teachers that they were the
subjects of an experiment on how the sense of taste triggers the retrieval of
buried long-term memories stored in the brain’s hippocampus. I wanted to test a hypothesis: can a person
be induced to experience a flashbulb memory if the hippocampus is deliberately
accessed via the sense of taste? I was eager to see how the sense of taste
triggers memory, unlocks the unconscious, and inspires workshop participants’
writing.
In the "Overture" to Swann's Way, Proust introduces his beliefs regarding how lost memories can be accessed through what he calls a "lost object," which he later clarifies as the lost taste of a childhood pastry, the madeleine, rediscovered while having tea at his mother's house. While setting the stage for the passage in which the madeleine transports him back to his childhood in Combray, Proust refers to a Celtic folk belief that "the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which may never come) when we happen to pass by the try or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison" (Proust, Swann’s Way, 54).
What Proust did not know was that the sense of taste and smell are linked to
the hippocampus, and that once this area of the brain is activated, lost
memories are retrieved from the depository of long-term memory. Not knowing
this, Proust struggles with his revelation, following the twists and turns of
his thoughts, until finally a full-blown memory bursts forth in his
consciousness, and he writes the famous madeleine scene (Proust 57 – 58). The
passage is remarkable for its detailed description of the transformation that
occurs inside the brain when lost or buried memories bloom back into life when
triggered by taste or smell. Many of us have had similar experiences, and so we
intuitively recognize Proust’s experience:
Many years had elapsed during which
nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and drama of my
going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came
home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not
ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason,
changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called
‘petites madeleines,’ which look as
though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And
soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing
morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a
morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it,
touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped,
intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place (54 – 55).
Proust
continues to describe a feeling of “all-powerful joy” that overcomes him, and
attempts to examine the source of the feeling. His insight is that “I was
conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it
infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature
as theirs.” (55).
Proust
delightfully describes his childhood in Combray in vivid detail, ending the
passage with the observation: “…so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
and in M. Swann’s park, and all the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good
folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the
whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing
solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea." (58). I emphasize “from my cup of tea”
with italics to illustrate how Proust clearly attributes his sudden memory to
his sense of taste.
Lehrer cites
the work of Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, who proved in her paper,
titled “Testing the Proustian Hypothesis,” that because the senses of smell and
taste in humans are linked directly to the hippocampus, the center of the
brain’s long-term memory, accessing specific, vivid, long-term memories through
taste can be a powerfully emotional experience for people. According to Herz,
the senses of sight, touch, and hearing are first processed by the thalamus,
which is the source of language and the gateway to consciousness. Therefore, humans
do not typically have epiphanic experiences associated with the senses of
sight, touch, or hearing (8).
Lehrer observes that “Proust even goes so far as to blame his sense of sight
for obscuring his childhood memories in the first place. ‘Perhaps because I had
so often seen such madeleines without
tasting them,’ Proust writes, ‘their image had disassociated itself from those
Combray days.’" (80 – 81). We now know that Proust’s intuition was
correct.
Proust
reasoned that the madeleine experience could be replicated. Theoretically one
could taste a sweet or a food from childhood or youth and then record one’s
involuntary memories and develop them for literary purposes, as Proust did.
This Proustian thought led me to wonder: Could the madeleine moment of epiphany
be consciously triggered if one were to serve a group of people a
memory-evoking food or candy and then ask them to freely write whatever was on
their minds? Possibly. Theoretically, yes. The science supports this
supposition. However, our relationships and memory associations with certain
foods are highly individualized; therefore, how could one recreate the
experience in a classroom setting? Perhaps, I reasoned, if one were to create the setting for the memory trigger with a homogeneous group of
people who have lived through a unifying event and quite possibly had consumed
a similar food because of cultural traditions or limitations to types of foods
available at a particular time? Certainly, in times of food rationing, certain
foods, especially those that are hard to come by, take on particular meaning.
To find the right group for my “madeleine
experiment” I had to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
My opportunity
to test my idea presented itself in February 2013 when I was invited to spend
two weeks in Lithuania in my professional capacity as an educational
researcher. The opportunity to teach writing workshops in Lithuania, a member
of the European Union, but also a post-Soviet country, provided me with the
opportunity to work with a homogeneous group that—because of the Soviet
occupation that ended in 1991—would have had more or less similar experiences
growing up, working, and adapting to the shift from communism to capitalism.
In the space
of two weeks, I led six writing workshops in six distinct regions of Lithuania:
Klaipėda, a coastal city; Vilnius, the capital; Siesikai, a small isolated
rural community; Domeikava, a suburb of Lithuania’s second most populous city,
Kaunas; and Onuškis, an isolated community surrounded by forests. In addition
to the teacher-training workshops, I’d been asked to privately conduct a
two-day writing seminar and workshop for a writers’ group in Klaipėda made up
of professionals, artists, and teachers who wrote habitually for their own
enjoyment. I would conduct the exercises and workshops in Lithuanian. I would
translate the writing samples myself into English for the purpose of my
research.
My goal was to
prepare a writing exercise that would induce participants to produce a
powerfully charged emotional piece of writing in a comparatively short period
of time—during a fifteen minute freewriting period. In order to produce
material strong enough to workshop in the condensed time allocated to us within
the scheduling constraints of the seminar, I would need to create conditions
that enabled a writer to access his or her unconscious mind during this short
period of time and to write from that place of lost memory. I had to consider
how I would facilitate getting writers to access their long-term memories in
order to produce writing that at its core conveyed an emotional truth, was
original, and met the aesthetic standards we expect when we engage in reading
literature. I thought about how I could replicate the madeleine phenomenon to
gain these results. At the same time it was important that workshop
participants not be aware that I was manipulating their long-term memories in
any way. Their memories and their subsequent writing had to be produced of
their own free will in order for my experiment be valid.
I set up a
series of test conditions in which I would encourage participants to taste
certain candies that had been the only sweets available during the Soviet era,
and then freewrite on their thoughts and feelings. I would not prompt the
participants or lead them towards involuntary memory, but would keep my eyes
and ears open for such memories when they occurred. I would also have the
advantage of being able to interview my participants on how they accessed their
involuntary memories and how the experience of accessing those memories
affected them, if they indeed experienced involuntary memories.
In the writing
process, the mind sheds seemingly extraneous detail in order to create a coherent
theme. The editing and revising process that takes place later organizes the
involuntary memory born from freewriting experiences into a coherent message.
Therefore, in my madeleine experiments, I resolved to pay close attention to
how participants recorded raw memories as they played out and how they shaped
and edited those memories into an easily recognizable narrative or genre.
Rational thinking is of little help to the writer in the composing phase. I
have used drawing exercises, improvised dialogues, storytelling, and other
creative methods to help writers access their unconscious.
Preparing for
the workshops, I took the unique history of the region into consideration. My
workshop participants would have shared a homogenous life, as well as life-changing
experiences. A little over twenty years ago the Baltic States lived through
massive cultural, sociological, economic, and political shifts. With the highly
emotionally charged independence movement, and then the collapse of the Soviet
Union, followed by two long decades of hard work rebuilding a democratic
western society, Lithuanians, like millions of others living in post-Soviet
countries, experienced radical changes in a quarter of an average
lifetime. In order to survive and adapt
to the fast-paced changes that occurred on every level of society, a type of
cultural amnesia was necessary. The memory of what it was like to live under a
totalitarian regime had to be repressed in order for people to adapt to a new
westernized mode of living and working and thinking. For the generation that is
now forty years old or older, there is a disconnect between the culture and
society of their early formative years and student years and the present. They
may live in the same physical territory, even in the same house or apartment,
but their society had changed completely. The points of social and cultural and
economic reference of their youth and childhood have radically shifted. Under
the Soviet communist system Soviet citizens lived in similar compact apartments
allocated by square meter according to family size and Party loyalties. Soviet
citizens wore Soviet factory issue clothing and shoes, with the additional
challenge of buying something western and stylish, like blue jeans, on the
black market or getting creative with sewing or knitting to design a more
interesting outfit. Under the communist system there was no unemployment, but
no choice of employment either. The government assigned you a work place and
you had no choice but to comply. Under the communist system you made do with
the resources allocated to you and you didn’t complain (publicly at least).
Money was hardly necessary because most of one’s needs, health care, education,
transportation, utilities, were covered by the government. With
the exception of a handful of Party apparatchiks
who had a relatively more comfortable life than the masses, everyone lived a
simple lifestyle that was more or less equal.
As bleak and
repressive as this uniform life seems to westerners, when interviewing people
who lived through this period of Soviet communism, I learned that there were
certain aspects of Soviet life that they found positive and which they missed,
and for which they felt a strong sense of nostalgia. The people I spoke with
revealed that they felt closer to their family and neighbors during the years
of Soviet occupation because everyone was “in the same boat” and they all
helped each other out in order to get by. Because of the deficit economy, food
and household goods were scarce and hard to come by. If someone heard that some
scarce food item was on sale at the local grocery store, they would let others
know, so that they all could benefit. Therefore, small luxuries, such as a
special candy, were cherished and appreciated. One person I spoke to told me
that as a child he never tasted chewing gum, but he had a few American gum
wrappers that another child had given him and he treasured them. Another aspect
of Soviet life was a type of group think, or Soviet idealism. One was
encouraged to live one’s life dedicated to the good of the “collective” rather
than the individual. This thinking helped people feel as though they were part
of a larger community working for a greater good.
After
independence the entire nation had to rebuild itself and create a new image in
a relatively short period of time. The period of national rebirth was a time of
joy and a time of loss. It was a time of new challenges and at the same time
nostalgia for a simpler past with simpler choices. Knowing in advance that the
demographic of my writers’ groups would be mostly women ages forty and up, I
knew that they personally would have lived through these massive cultural
shifts. I just needed a catalyst to trigger their memories of these times in a
powerful way. I wanted to use a food that had been scarce during the Soviet
era, and therefore special and possibly
memory evoking.
The 2003
German tragicomedic film Goodbye Lenin
(directed by Wolfgang Becker) illustrates how confusing the radical change of a
country’s entire political, cultural, and social structure was for East Germans
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the film, a woman, Christiane, wakes up
after a coma eight months after the fall of communism. Her family, worried that
the shock of the sudden radical political changes would cause Christiane to
have a second heart attack, makes a gallant effort to hide the truth from her.
Although keeping her isolated and bedridden in the family apartment preserves
her ignorance of the country’s political situation, Christiane’s son and
primary caretaker, Alex, runs into a major snag when she requests a specific
brand of East German pickles. These pickles, along with all the other commonly
consumed East German brands, disappeared overnight along with the wall when the
East Berlin supermarkets were restructured as Western supermarkets carrying
only Western products. Alex faces the challenge of tracking down remnants of
East German pickles to appease his mother. This theme repeatedly plays out
throughout the film as he searches supermarket shelves for the “lost” pickles.
These
supermarket scenes reminded me of my experiences in Lithuania in the early
nineties, just after the fall of communism. The supermarkets began carrying
exclusively western products. Elderly people would approach me in the aisles
and ask me to help them with their shopping because they could not locate any
of the brands they were used to eating and could not read the foreign labels of
the new brands. So, the pickle-hunt scenes in Goodbye Lenin resonate.
Rather
than pickles, I decided to use candy as my memory catalyst. To find the
appropriate edible memory trigger for my experiment, I thought back to a memory
of my own from the years 1988-1989, when I studied at Vilnius University. It
was only two years before the Soviet Union disbanded and Lithuania gained its
independence. That winter I became ill with double pneumonia and had to be
hospitalized. My classmates in the Lithuanian literature department were concerned that as an American I would have a
hard time “surviving” a Soviet hospitalization. I am allergic to penicillin and
no synthetic antibiotics were available in the Soviet Union at the time, making my recovery even more
challenging. My friends brought me food to comfort me during my six-week
hospitalization. The cabinet beside my bed was crammed full of canning jars
filled with pickles, pancakes, apple sauce, and slabs of bacon and rings of
smoked sausage brought by friends whose parents lived on farms.
However,
the one special treat I remember most from those long days in the hospital was
Soviet-era candy. The memory is linked to an event that has stood out in my
mind. One evening a friend, a student named Vygantas, came to visit me. He had
long blond hair tied back into a ponytail and was dressed in the hippie attire
of young Lithuanian folk musicians at the time.
“I brought you
something that’s very hard to come by,” Vygantas bragged, eyeing the cabinet
crammed with sausage and canning jars as though to let me know that all that
would pale in comparison to his food offering.
I sat up in my
hospital bed, curious to find out what this rare item would be.
He opened up
his hand, and in his palm were two small chocolate candies wrapped in blue
wrapping paper with a drawing of a polar bear strolling across a snow-covered
plain.
“These are
called Meška Šiaurėje (Polar Bear in
the North),” he said. “They are a deficit item, but I was lucky enough to get
two. Enjoy. Just let them melt in your mouth and savor the taste.”
I slowly and
carefully unwrapped the candy wrapper and popped the dark chocolate in my
mouth. The candy had that typical gritty Soviet texture. There was a faint
taste of peanut butter mixed with the chocolate. The candy was not especially
tasty, not at all as tasty as a Snickers or a Mars Bar, but I appreciated the
hours of waiting in a queue it took my friend to get them.
I will always
remember that sense of awe my friend had expressed for the Polar Bear in the
North candy. Months later, when I was released from the hospital, I searched
for Polar Bear in the North in the groceries and could not find it. Indeed, the
candy had been a special gift. Although the candy was not especially tasty to
me, the gesture of a friend going to the trouble to bring me the candy stayed
with me. The candy symbolized the kindness of taking the time to break away
from a busy student schedule to visit me in the hospital and bring me the candy
along with the latest reports on the protests taking place out on the streets
of Vilnius. When selecting the memory-catalyst for my Proustian experiment, I
intuited that candies that were once a rarity would be my writing workshop
participants’ madeleines.
Under
communism, even candy production was controlled and limited to less than ten
different types. Although these Soviet-era candies are still sold in most
grocery stores, with the wide selection of foreign candies and new good-quality and gourmet
Lithuanian candies available, the old Soviet-era deficit candies are not the
first item on most people’s grocery lists. It is the custom in Lithuania to
bring either candy or wine when visiting friends. Hardly anyone brought the old
Soviet candies to gift their hosts anymore. Therefore, I reasoned that, like
Proust’s madeleine, the taste of Soviet-era factory chocolates would have been
long forgotten and hence could be effectively rekindled under the right
conditions.
For the sake
of nostalgia, I went to one of the last remaining Soviet-style groceries in
Vilnius—the
kind where you point at the shelf and indicate what you want and a glaring,
square-shouldered, hold-over Soviet-era matron in a white lab coat and white
cap takes it down for you and rings it up at the counter. This grocery still
carries bins of my deficit-era candies and sells them by the kilo. I selected
several brands: Polar Bear in the North
(Meška šiaurėje); Little Cows
(Karvutės); Pineapple (Ananasiniai) and
Milk of the Birds (Pauksciu pienas).
I also bought some “zephyrs,” tangy marshmellow candies in the shape of half
shells. I added tangerines to my list as well.
Tangerines, manderines, and oranges were practically non-existant in
Soviet grocery stores. People considered themselves lucky to taste an orange
once in their lifetimes under the Soviets.
I structured
my workshops as follows: I would talk about writing exercises as a catalyst for
generating writing and then would talk about freewriting in particular.
Freewriting is an exercise in which one writes continuously for a fixed amount
of time—usually either in five, ten, or fifteen minute intervals, without
pausing— either on a theme assigned by the instructor or on any theme that comes
into the student’s head. The idea is to mine the unconscious in order to allow
ideas to flow. In a second draft, those ideas are shaped into a narrative.
Before the freewriting session began, I would pass around my plate of candies,
zephyrs, and tangerines and encourage participants to taste a treat before they
began writing. I would casually say to them: “If you don’t have any ideas to
write about, just describe the taste of the treat you’ve selected.”
I watched as
people made their selections. Many paused to consider before choosing a treat.
One woman blurted out, “Can’t I just have one of each.” “Sorry,” I said, “Just
one.” Once everyone had eaten their treat, I’d tell them that I would now time
them for a fifteen-minute freewrite. I reminded them not to worry about
grammar, style, or punctuation. I told them that it would be their choice
whether they shared what they had written with the group or not. Following the
freewriting, there would be an opportunity to share work, share ideas, discuss.
Then, time permitting, participants would take what they had written and shape
it into more formalized writing.
I was not
prepared for the emotional responses that I received. I had expected that fewer than half of
the participants would have a flashbulb memory experience. What I found was
that in the six workshops in which I conducted this experiment 99% of the participants had powerful flashbulb
memory experiences and were eager to share them. The one or two people in each
group—and each group was made up of between ten and thirty participants—who did
not have a flashbulb memory experience, and in fact could not and did not
connect with the stories of those who did, were younger women in their
twenties. These women expressed a sense
of bafflement, frustration, and exclusion when workshop participants ages 40
and up eagerly exchanged memories of Soviet-era scenes from their family or
work or student lives that were evoked by tasting the candy. These younger
women talked about how they grew up with more candy than they could ever eat or
want and what was the big deal? The older participants were uncomfortable with
these comments and insisted that the younger generation could not comprehend
what their lives had been like under the Soviet system, living in a deficit
economy.
When working
with a group of 30 professionals who came to my writing workshop as part of a
series of writer-led workshops at the Ieva Simonaityte Library in Klaipėda,
several members of the group cried when reading their candy-related memory
pieces to the group. Others comforted them and expressed their solidarity on
how difficult it was to find themselves back “physically” in that place in
their past that they had left behind and had outgrown. This emotionality
prompted one woman to shout at me, somewhat aggressively, though at the same
time with a touch of irony: “What did you
put in that candy!” When I explained that I was attempting to recreate
Proust’s madeleine experience, some participants were delighted, while others
expressed that they felt that they were manipulated to feel vulnerable.
People whose
memories from decades past are triggered by taste describe the experience not
as the type of memory one works to dredge up from the unconscious mind,
but as a sensation that does not resemble memory as we traditionally understand
it. The experience is emotionally overwhelming, in that one finds oneself
physically, psychologically, emotionally, returned to the place and the time
where the memory took place with all details played back to them in vivid and
accurate color. A recurring theme expressed in all six workshops was that the
flashbulb memory was not experienced as
one normally experiences memory, but that the participant was overwhelmed by a
sudden, detailed image from their past which preoccupied them and rendered them
unable to think or write about anything else.
In Vilnius I
conducted the candy experiment with a group of 30 educators who taught in an
inner city school in the roughest neighborhood. Their job was challenging, but
they were also well prepared for those challenges. I would have liked to have
heard everyone’s piece, but there simply was not enough time. During our lunch
break, after the writing activity was over, a woman in her mid-sixties
approached me and invited me to sit at her table. She was eager to tell me what
she had been too shy to express in front of the larger group:
“My
mother is 90 now, and I go often to my village to take care of her,” she said.
“I always think of her as a frail and old woman. I haven’t thought of her as anything but old
and frail for many years now. But the strangest thing happened to me today in
class. When I bit into the Pineapple candy, suddenly I saw my mother standing
in front of me as a young woman. I saw her youthful face and her long blond
hair plaited into thick braids. It was not at all like when I try to remember her the way she was when she
was young. She was simply there, in front of me, in physical form. It was
difficult for me to recover from seeing her standing there in the classroom as
a young woman because it came as such a shock. When I was a little girl, my
mother worked in the grocery shop in our village. She was in charge of handling
large buckets of Pineapple candies when they were available for
sale. Those days she would stand beside the candies all day long, weighing them
and selling them to long queues of people. I would go to visit her while she
was at work. Occasionally, I’d sneak a few candies.”
A
recurring theme in my candy-writing exercises was an association between the
candy and a person who was important to the writer: a mother, a close friend or
family member, or someone who had shown special kindness.
A teacher in her late fifties from the rural town of Siesikai shared
the following piece:
I
chose a Pineapple candy and bit into it. For some reason, the moment I tasted
the pineapple flavor I remembered my friend, Vanda, whom I haven’t thought
about in years. When we were girls, Vanda had a connection with people who
worked in the candy factory in Kaunas. She would bring me two or three kilos of
Pineapple candy whenever she could. We would climb up into a tree with our
books and read and eat the tangy pineapple-flavored chocolate candy. My friend
Vanda had such a good heart. She was generous with her candy. We grew up. We
both went off to study; we married; we began working; we raised our families;
and we grew apart. I hadn’t talked to Vanda in years, but when my son needed to
pass his 12th grade exams, Vanda came back into my life and offered to tutor
him and help him prepare for the exams. She did, and he passed. He could not
have done it without her. Vanda has been very sick for the last few years and
is not working anymore. I ought to go see her. She has such a good heart. How could I have forgotten her?
At the
Klaipėda writers’ workshop, a woman described her memory associated with Little Cows. As a teenager, she had a friend who worked in a candy factory.
That friend would sometimes come to her house, bringing a bag filled with
Little Cows. The two teenage girls would sit with her mother on the couch and
stuff themselves with the candy while watching movies on television. This woman
was very close to her mother and the Little Cows reminded her of her mother,
who had died a few years later when she was barely out of her teenage years.
Now, she works as a teacher in a high school. On Fridays, after work, she goes
to the grocery store and buys a bag of Little Cows, takes them home and sits on the couch alone, watching a movie,
stuffing herself with the candy because the candy brings her mother back to
her.
The woman seated beside her fought
back tears while reading her piece. The
Little Cows also reminded her of her
mother, who was dying in the hospital, and with whom she’d had a difficult and
painful relationship. The next day, when we worked with shaping the raw
material we’d mined from the candies into more focused narratives, this woman
chose to write a letter to her mother, in which she recalled her painful
memories and which she ended with two simple sentences: “Mother, I love you. I
forgive you.” In her initial freewrite her emotions towards her mother were
wild, uncontrolled, riddled with guilt. Why? Because the Little Cow candy reminded her of home. It was the candy her mother
ate at home, a treat. During our initial discussion of her freewrite, this
woman made the association that “Although we always had food and even candy at
home, we had very little love.” Other writers in the group felt the
opposite—there was a lot of love, and candy was a rare and sought-after treat.
After much discussion and reflection, this woman was able to write the
following epistle to her mother:
Letter to Mama
Mama, I want to talk with
you about that thing that we never spoke of our entire lives, not even one
word, not when it happened, and never afterwards… Not you, not me. No one.
Maybe there is no need? Maybe?
We lived on the
land. In Lieporų. Not far from the Latvian border. We didn’t have much. We had
too much. We had enough. We had clothing. And food. And candy. We even had
chocolate-covered Zephyrs that your brother, Uncle Joseph, would bring over
from Jūrmala. But I do not know if we had enough love. As far back as I
remember I was searching for love. I
feel as though I have spent my entire life searching for love and it always
seems that there was never enough. Never enough…
Why? What made it that way? How did
it happen?
A few incidents have
seared their way into my soul.
The first is the
theft in the collective farm offices. The offices we (you, me, and my older
sisters) cleaned in the evenings. That time you blamed me. You said that I
stole the calculator.
I was so ashamed.
Insanely ashamed. Only, I don’t know if I was ashamed of myself, or of you. Me,
a teenager, I was called into the principal’s office. I was called in to
confess to a theft I did not commit. Did I tell the truth? Did I dare tell them
that you were the actual thief?
Can you imagine: I
don’t remember. I have blocked out the details. I have erased them. Only one
truth remained—you had betrayed me. You betrayed my love for you. I wanted to
kill myself. I wanted to stab myself. I remember that I even wrote out my will…
The other incident
occurred when I was a student. I was in my first year and it was the beginning
of summer. I had an appendicitis operation in Klaipėda. We were separated by 200 kilometers. I did not want to worry
you, Mama. I didn’t even tell you. Or perhaps, in those days, it wasn’t so easy
to contact you? Or maybe we didn’t share a bond anymore? When I returned to our
farm for the summer solstice, I knew only one thing, that I would not be able
to do physical work. Nobody was home. The neighbor hurried over to tell me that
I had to haul the hay out of the barn and set up the haystacks immediately, so
that the hay would dry by evening—he was going to cart it away for us. That is
how I ended up working out in the fields. Maybe I wanted to do something
heroic? It wasn’t easy, but I stacked all the hay and dried it. Then, it so
happened, that you came home and angrily told me to drag that hay right back
into the barn because for some reason (and I don’t remember why) we could not
cart it away that evening…
Gritting my teeth
(and my soul) I was determined to get the job done, although it was already
growing dark and it seemed impossible. I don’t know how, but my sister Lolita
(my guardian angel) came to my rescue. The two of us worked hard until we
dragged all the hay back into the barn. Until it was pitch black night. Until
we had not an ounce of strength left to blame anyone, to feel sorry, or to
love…
I miss you, Mama. I
love you anyway. I have written about my two (and your two) life events. How
many years have gone by before I was strong enough today to write to you about
all this? How many years have had to go by for me to be able (here and now) to
say the words: “I forgive you, Mama…”
Your little one
The
powerful feelings that come through in this simple letter—the lack of love, the
search for love, finding love—emotions that this woman had held at bay for
several decades, all came spilling forth in the moment she bit into the candy
that reminded her of the hurt of those long-buried feelings she could no longer hide away from her mother.
With encouragement from the group, on the second day of the workshop she was
able to shape the raw emotion of her freewrite into this letter and finally
find peace for the injustices that had happened decades ago, back in the days
of the Soviet Union, when life in the collective farm communities consisted of
hard work and a good dash of bitterness in order to survive. After reading her
letter to her mother, this woman cried, and we all cried along with her. She
said that she felt as though a heavy burden had been lifted from her shoulders in
that moment when she had been able to finally forgive her mother. All that
wrapped up in a single square of candy!
Like
the woman who had a painful relationship with her mother, several participants
associated a specific taste with traumatic life events. The woman who wrote
this paragraph shyly expressed to me that she had been shocked by the bare
honesty of her long-suppressed memory when it burst forth in her freewrite.
I
chose the tangerine, but in my heart I wished it to be an orange. I carry an
orange inside of me all the time. Now you can buy them anywhere at any time,
but when I was growing up they were something rare and to be treasured, a treat
you might or might not receive for Christmas. I grew up without a father. I
grew up alone with my grandparents in a small wooden house on the edge of the
forest. My childhood was lonely. I never knew my father. I saw him only once in
my life. It was dark, around Christmastime. I was sitting by the stove when
this man came into the house and my grandmother told me it was my father. He
handed me an orange—an incredible treat back then. I’d never seen or tasted an
orange. It was a tremendous gift. He told me that he always loved me, that he
thought of me every day. Then he turned and walked back out into the snowstorm.
He died two weeks later. I know now that he was not a good man. He committed
crimes. But he did love me. When I taste an orange I remember his love. I carry
that orange around with me in my soul wherever I go. Whenever I go to the
supermarket now, I visit with the oranges and I remember my father.
Another strong theme that emerged in the
freewrites was that of then versus now. The following excerpt is a good example
of this dichotomy:
Ah
well, it is my childhood flavor that is in my mouth… When my sister and I were
little, even these Pineapple candies
were a scarcity. We only tasted candy on holidays. But now… What’s there to
say? Every day we are tempted by flashy, tasty candies. We are surrounded by
all sorts of tasty treats—you just need to have enough money and you can buy
whatever you like. Maybe that is why children today don’t appreciate holidays
the way we did when we were children. It’s always like this. When you have too
much of something you don’t appreciate it; it doesn’t make you happy; and you
don’t think about what it means to you or to someone else. Even something like
a comfortable apartment or a car has become bland and ordinary. You couldn’t
even imagine your life anymore without these basic comforts. Oh, but my
parents, my grandparents, their lives were completely different. When I hear
their stories… In our times… Then even I become nostalgic and begin to mourn
what they felt for each other, how dear they were to each other….
I was
surprised that some participants, writing spontaneously and in a fixed amount
of time, wrote essays that were of a sociological nature. The following piece
was written without revision by a teacher at a school in Domeikava, a suburb of
Kaunas:
The
Polar Bear in the North candy in my mouth smells like nuts, tastes like
chocolate, and has a crunchy texture when you bite into it. The candy reminds
me of the Soviet era. This type of candy was the tastiest of all of them. Often
they were hard to find. I lived with my family—my mother and two sisters—in a
small wooden house in a small town. I tasted this candy only a few times in my
life back then. The wrapper was different back then, too. The wrapper was blue
and paper, not cellophane like this one. The picture was much simpler—just a
polar bear set against a blue background. Recently one of my students, a
heavy-set girl in my ninth grade class, told me that Polar Bear in the North is her favorite candy and that she can
polish off a kilo or two in one sitting. Just before Christmas she brought in a
bag of these candies and walked around the classroom, parceling out two apiece
to each student. Of course, we all ate the candy. Meanwhile, she told us about
how her family was traveling to Tunisia for Christmas holidays, and about how
it would be their third trip to Tunisia. There were young people in that class
who had never even traveled beyond the city limits of Kaunas! And here they
were now, subjected to this self-confidant rich girl’s narration about her
travels. I also began to dream about going somewhere warm for winter vacation.
I felt like that polar bear in the north. Outside the classroom window it was
cold and dark. Oh well, I thought, the winter vacation will pass quickly, just
like this candy quickly melting in my mouth. This candy, which for some reason,
no longer tasted any good.
I
found it interesting that by the time she reached the end of her meditation on
the candy and on social inequalities, the taste of the candy in her mouth
literally changed and no longer tasted good. The nature of this teacher’s
memories and present association with the memory changed her perception of the
candy in her mouth. After the teacher
read this freewrite, the other teachers launched into an animated discussion of
the social inequalities they’ve all had to endure since independence. They
pointed out a link between the material poverty of the writer’s childhood
during the Soviet era and the continuing poverty of the children in her class,
only the students’ poverty was more painful to them because they were subjected
to wealthier children flaunting their privileges. Back in the days of the
Soviet Union, the teachers explained, we were all in it together.
What makes
Proust a genius is that he did not simply stop and indulge himself in the
unexpected childhood memories that the cookie brought to mind, but according to
Lehrer “… once Proust began to remember his past, he lost all interest in the
taste of the madeleine. Instead, he became obsessed with how he felt about the cookie, with what the
cookie meant to him. What else would
these crumbs teach him about his past? What other memories could emerge from
these magic mouthfuls of flour and butter? (Lehrer 81).”
In the two-day
workshop I taught in the port city of Klaipėda, most of the participants, who
were either working writers or working seriously on developing the craft of
writing, took the extra time to shape the raw memories the candy had elicited
and develop them into art. The images in the poem below—women waiting on a
queue for candy, pregnancy, birds, silence—seem disjointed, linked loosely by the
poet’s subconscious. What is interesting about Proust’s memories evoked by the
madeleine is that they lead to other memories that seem random and disjointed,
but in Proust’s inner logic, they are somehow connected: “In this Proustian
vision, the cookie is worthy of philosophy because in the mind, everything is
connected. As a result, a madeleine can easily become a revelation. And while
some of Proust’s ensuing mental associations are logical (for example, the
taste of the madeleine and the memory of Combray), others feel oddly random
(Lehrer 81).” We see this same random work of the unconscious in this poem,
written by Klaipėda poet Sondra Simane. Sondra bit into the Milk of the Birds candy and remembered
standing on food lines back in the days of the Soviet deficit economy. But,
rather than remain firmly rooted in that particular concrete memory, the poet
allows herself to free associate, linking together seemingly random images and
emotions, arriving at her own fears of her upcoming birthing, which she must
live through. Similarly, Lehrer observes: “Why does the cookie also bring to
mind ‘the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain
bowl with water and steeping it in little pieces of paper’? And why does a
starchy napkin remind him of the Atlantic Ocean, which ‘swells in blue and
blossomy undulations’? An honest chronicler of his own brain, Proust embraced
such strange associations precisely because he couldn’t explain them. He
understood that idiosyncrasy was the essence of personality. Only by
meticulously retracing the loom or our neural connections—however nonsensical
these connections may be—can we understand ourselves, for we are our loom.” Proust gleaned all of this wisdom from an
afternoon tea
(Lehrer
81).Sondra allows herself to free associate her random memories as they come to
her, circling back always to the central memory evoked by the taste of the
candy.
Eilėje
prie Paukščių pieno Standing
on line to buy Milk of the Birds candies
Paukščių pieno, - sako aukšta moteris brunetei, Milk of the Birds, the tall woman
says to the brunette
Ir juda link manęs. And
moves closer towards me.
Dar keturios ir aš. There
are four ahead of me.
Kartoju: paukščių pieno ir imu aptrupėjusią plytelę. I repeat: Milk of the Birds and reach for a
crumbling square.
Putojantis baltas šerbetas, - White
milky sherbert--
Rembranto potėpis Saskijos šlauny, Rembrandt’s brush
stroke, Saskia’s thigh.
Juodi saldūs trupiniai Sweet
black crumbs
Saskijos plaukuose. In
Saskia’s hair.
Suleidžiu dantis ir laukiu. I
sink my teeth into the candy and I wait.
Laukiuosi, You
are pregnant,
primenu sau taip tyliai, I
remind myself so quietly
Kad girdėti tik laivų stiebai, That
all I hear are boat masts,
Svyrantys nuo sienų, Tumbling
down from the walls,
Ir afrikietiškos kaukės, And
the African masks,
Miegančios gilyn į trečiąją akį. Sleeping
deeply in the third eye.
...
O paukščiai išskleidžia saldžius sparnus And the birds spread their sweet wings
Ir spiria į paširdžius. And
kick me just beneath my heart.
Laukite, sakau moterims, Wait,
I say to the women,
Eilėje prie paukščių pieno, In
the queue for Milk of the Birds,
Laukite net tuomet, kai Wait
even then when
Paukščiai tyli, Quietly
the birds
Snapais į karsta Peck
with their beaks
Kaldami. Into
my coffin.
Please
note that in Lithuanian the verb “to wait” means both to literally wait and to
be pregnant. When questioned by the group about the last three lines of her
poem, Sondra, who is 45 and pregnant with her sixth child, explained that when
birthing the risk of death is always present. This thought floated into her
mind when she bit into the candy and remembered the queues of the Soviet era.
Waiting on the queue somehow associated in her mind with waiting for a baby to
be born.
The idea that
people have more material wealth and access to goods now than they ever did
before, but that they are unhappier, came up in all the workshops. Participants
had emotionally overwhelming experiences of nostalgia for simpler times when
there was less choice, less opportunity, less material wealth, but a good deal
more warmth between people. These
emotions are present in this spontaneous freewrite by a library worker from
Klaipėda. The following unedited freewriting sample expresses these warm
comradely feelings and the sense of despair over having lost them:
The taste of Milk of the
Birds candy reminds me of the Soviet
era and my job in the Botanical Institute Library. We library workers offered
everyone who came in a piece of candy. “Where did you get it?” people would
ask. A Jewish man had opened up his own candy shop inside the institute. The
administration rented him a laboratory space… Those were the days of the first
cooperative shops. They made all sorts of candy in the lab—yellow candy with
red inside—unheard of candy in terms of taste and appearance. They made Milk of
the Birds. You could buy the candy cheaply if you bought it by the kilo and
without a box, and if you don’t mind if the candy is a little lopsided. He sold
it all for kopeks. It didn’t matter, the taste wasn’t any worse for his cheap
prices. Antanina took our orders for measured kilograms of candy: “Get some for
me—I don’t care if they’re lopsided.” It’s funny and sad and sweet all at the
same time… Now I’m preparing for a trip abroad and I am going out of my mind
trying to come up with ideas as to what to bring with me as a gift. Twenty
years have gone by and now we have everything. I walk inside any common grocery
store now and I am overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness. When there is so
much of everything, I want nothing. I feel sick to my stomach from that feeling
of not wanting anything. After all, everywhere everyone has too much of
everything. Who needs the knickknacks that I will bring them? They won’t have
anywhere to put them. I long for the days when every one of us was overjoyed
when someone offered us a candy, and you knew that the candy was offered from
the heart. It was so easy to surprise people and make them happy. It was easier
to feel happy. It is a strange feeling, this having too much of everything. It
brings all these psychological problems along with it.
Something must be
left from those days? Only what? It was so pleasant then to enjoy tasting a
candy that was offered to you; to savor the candy’s taste, to feel how with the
movement of your hand reaching out for that candy, your thoughts would begin to
flow of their own accord.
As expressed
in this piece, simple pleasures, such as offering someone, or being offered, a piece of candy, were appreciated.
When teaching
in remote Siesikai and remembering Goodbye
Lenin, I decided to add pickles into the food-memory mix. Here is an
example of a freewrite in which a woman associates pickles with her childhood
and finds a link between the past and the present:
Unexpectedly,
I bit into a pickle and without even realizing it, I returned to my childhood.
I remembered summer vacations at Grandmother’s house. I see in front of me the
huge barrel of pickles down in the root cellar. There is a large wooden cover
on top, held in place with a stone. I see myself as a little girl, picking
cherries, blackberries, running towards Grandmother, who is working in the
garden. Those were good times. Even now I like to can pickles. I cook and boil
all sorts of combinations of vegetables and pickles. I feel happy when spring
comes and the earth is warm. I drop those little cucumber seeds into the earth
and then I wait for the yellow blooms, and then later in the summer, the green
cucumbers. Then the hunt for recipes begins; the conversations with neighbors
over canning and spices; the exchange of expertise. I am so happy when my
pickles turn out good and when I offer them to friends and family and neighbors
to enjoy they all smile and tell me how good they taste. Then, I grow tired of
new recipes and my mind bends back to Grandmother’s pickle barrel.
In
Vilnius there were teachers in my workshop who had flashbulb memories of
working in the local candy factory as teenagers. As was the custom in the
Soviet era, high school and college students had to volunteer a certain amount
of time working for the State. These women had unique memories associated with
the candies:
The smell of chocolate always brings back certain associations and
memories. I remember when I was (no, I don’t remember what class I was
in then) we had to fulfill our work quota at the Pergale chocolate factory. I can’t remember the exact name they called the
chocolate factory back then. On the very first day
when I arrived at the chocolate factory, I was delighted by the wonderful scent
of chocolate. We kids had to pack the New Year’s Eve boxes. In the corner there
were sacks of nuts.We were allowed to eat our fill. The only rule was that we
couldn’t leave the factory with any candy or nuts. We could only eat it while
we were there. And eat we did. We crammed our faces full. They took us on a
tour of the factory and showed us how candy was made. We saw how they made the
Milk of the Birds and other candies. After we worked there a few days, none of
us could stand the sight of any candy any longer. I would throw up as soon as I
approached the vicinity of the candy factory. All of us were saying to each
other: I’ve eaten enough candy for a lifetime. When I went home after work I happily
ate cabbage soup or pickles. These days, whenever I drive past the chocolate
factory, the smell makes me sick.
Lithuania
is a small northern country, a member of NATO and the European Union.
Lithuania’s neighbor, Russia, is often politically at odds with the Baltic
States. A little more than twenty years ago Lithuania and Russia were the same
country—two Soviet states within the Soviet Union. Soviet chocolates were
uniform from the Urals to the Baltic. Therefore, I found it interesting to find
a reference to the Polar Bear in the North chocolates in a personal essay in The New Yorker blog by formerly Russian,
now Canadian, writer Mikhail Iossel. This particular candy serves as the
catalyst to reunite two old high school friends in a chance meeting at Strand
Books in New York City:
Someone
I hadn’t seen in forty years recognized me the other afternoon at the Strand
Book Store. In middle and high school back in Leningrad, he had been one of my
closest friends. He was buying a coffee-table album of New York pictures
(something along the lines of “To See New York and Die”; for his mother-in-law,
he told me, winking), and I’d stopped by on my way to a friend’s house in the
neighborhood.
A
burly, broad-shouldered, handsome man of vaguely Levantine aspect—a cross, of
sorts, between Hitchcock and … oh well, those crosses and parallels tend to
make nothing more vivid; a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Angelina Jolie:
how’s that?—he hailed me good-naturedly, in Russian, as I was passing by the
cash register: “M! M! Is that you? … Is Mishka already up north?”
That
was an old running high-school joke between us. “Mishka up north” had been one
of the most popular brands of chocolate bar in the Soviet Union. Its wrapper
pictured a dignified-looking polar bear strolling along a massive floe of
Arctic ice. Mishka is the common loving diminutive for any kind of bear, in
Russian—be it black or polar. Mishka, of course, is also the diminutive, highly
irreverent, and child-like form of Misha, which itself is the diminutive of
Mikhail, which is my name. For someone to be “up north,” in the general Soviet
parlance, meant his having been arrested and sent off to one of the gulag
destinations for his political activities—or, more likely and pertinently, the
looseness of his lips, the pointless frivolity of his speeches.
The
Polar Bear in the North candy takes on a different meaning in the banter
between two old friends, a meaning that has a distinctly shaded Russian nuance,
which is different from the mostly sentimental associations the candy held for
the Lithuanian school teachers and fledgling writers who participated in my
candy experiments. Two distinct worlds, united under one political system,
associated the same candy with a different kind of memory.
Psychologist
Barry Schwartz in his TED talk “The Paradox of Choice” discusses how increasingly
more and more choices make us more and more miserable. Under the Soviet system,
one had little to no choice. Now, as members of the European Union and a
greater Europe, Lithuanians are overwhelmed by choices and opportunities. These
new-found opportunities create stress for people. In the six locations where I
conducted my candy experiments, I listened as person after person spoke and
wrote with great nostalgia about the good old Soviet days. Although one’s first
thought might be that these people are politically naïve and pine for a Big
Brother figure, a Stalin or a Brezhnev, this is not the case. Contemporary
post-Soviet people would never seriously condone returning to life as it was
under the Soviets. They are appreciative of the privileges of democracy,
independence, and capitalism. What they do long for with great nostalgia are
simpler days. They mourn the loss of the psychological simplicity of living a
life in which they are absolved of the complications of having to choose, even
if it is the matter of a choice between two good options. The following essay
by a young Lithuanian woman who works as an English teacher after having lived
in England for five years is a good example:
The
basket filled with treats is coming closer to me. From afar I see the yellow
wrapper of the Pineapple candy. At least once in my life I know quite firmly
what I will choose. But then again, when I see the selection from up close, I
waver. Maybe I should take Milk of the Birds? It looks so tantalizing with its
wrapper removed, ah, chocolate. I freeze. Perhaps I can have them both? Time
slows down. The others are growing impatient with me. I can’t believe I’m
tormented by having to make a choice—over candy?! It’s always like this with
me! All these choices are killing me! Why can I never have both at the same
time? Why can’t I walk two roads at once? Why can’t I live in Vilnius, and in
Klaipėda? Vilnius is the capital, but the sea is here. My mother is there, but
my friends are here. Should I emigrate abroad or live in my own country? Should
I worry about money or my health? Should I dedicate myself to raising happy
children or having a career? Should I live in an apartment in the center or in
a house in the suburbs? Should I have a third baby or take some time for
myself? Should I have tea or coffee? With sugar or without? Should I have a
Pineapple candy or Milk of the Birds? It is always eating away at me, would the
other path have been better? How will I ever know? Can I live here and there?
Can I make my decision after I’ve tried both? Then I start blaming the Soviets.
I blame the Soviet daycare where I was forced to be just like everyone else and
to fear authority and listen to directions. I have grown children already and I
still want someone to lead me by the hand. So, which candy shall it be?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Wolfgang. Goodbye, Lenin. 2003. Film.
Iossel, Mikhail. The
New Yorker, online blog, March 14, 2013.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/mikhail-iossel
Lehrer, Jonah. Proust
Was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
Pillemer, David B. Momentous Events, Vivid Memories. Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
Proust, Marcel. In
Search of Lost Time. New York: The Modern Library, 2003.
Schwartz, Barry. “The Paradox of Choice.” TED talk.
2007. Online.
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html
Website of the Ieva Simonaityte Library in Klaipėda,
Lithuania. Online.
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