In my physics class, my teacher tells me to analyze my data points in order to linearize the function. He tells me to find a pattern in the points and to cube them, or take the square root, in order to plot the points in a straight line. If the graph isn’t linear, he says, we can’t understand what it represents. Our memories are like this too. In fact, every human is a mathematician of the memory, infatuated with the ideal of a linearized function-that every X has its own formula that contains it, that the events of our lives can be plotted in a straight line with constant slope.
We take our alphabet of memories, of taste and touch and jealousy and compassion and compress them into X’s and Y’s and plot them in a straight line so that we may gain a sense of growth, a sense of purpose, a sense of sense. But some graphs can’t be linearized. Nature itself is not linear. Life will never be justly compacted into numbers and graphs because nature is free and spontaneous; it is not a function because functions are generalized representations of what we call reality.
Art mocks our minds’ attempts to linearize our lives. While art is dependent on mathematics, it also accepts that math is insufficient. Art plays with “reality,” my attempt to recreate the expression of my father’s face that day eight years ago through an augmented chord in the bass clef, to show the way it felt to lose myself by arching my back, tilting my head, and spinning on my toes.
Art is the outlet for our memories; it embraces our inability to plot our lives in straight lines and allows us to plot them crooked. It helps us to understand that while our lives are not linear, they contain an element of symmetry, that there is meaning in the chaos, that to make the infinite finite is beautiful. This is the eternal obsession for all artists: to express that split-second photo frame of essence in movement or music or paint or prose. But memory is involuntary.
One cannot think of a moment then see it. Rather, memories come as flashes of image coughed up into the mouth of the conscious from the phlegm-filled throat of the subconscious. It can happen at any moment-that is why you will see me scribbling poetry on Papa Gino’s napkins, dancing in the corridor when there is no music. Within the optic, the olfactory, the tactile, the audible, one has the essence of memory as drawn in through the senses – there is the reality that I have perceived.
