A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Something of interest—overlooked, easily missed. Memory reveals itself in flashes: a red window of blurred desert, skin stained and pricked by wild blackberries. Eyes open for the image that summons the memory.

GETTING STARTED AND SETTING OUT

My favorite chapter in any field guide. What to pack in the canvas bag? Newsprint for wrapping specimens; sandwich and canteen; a hat to cheat the sun; notebook and reliable ink. Keeping notes in the field is the hallmark of the dedicated student. Otherwise, once home, you’ll unpack nothing but a bag of rocks. Your notes will provide context, nail down ephemera (creek bed, mile 1.2, partially immersed, waterline). Your notes will be the record that survives you.

Bring silence, and an ear tuned to slight differences. Bring palms embedded with grit; bring water. Comb the world for clues. The banded agate damp with lake water, crusted with sand: get close, peering, picking through. Find the pottery shard hid in dirt; find the dirt. Exile is a condition of the redeemed life. Remember: you find what you look for; when presented with a fragment, fit a builded life to it. Line the pieces up and study them, catalogue and compare. Remember to keep careful notes. In India ink, which resists fade and run.

SPECIMEN: DAMSELFLY

The shape of a flattened oval, another; a pair, cut clean, as by newly sharpened shears. Black like deep-pile velvet, rich, topographic: silvery along the wrinkles’ ridges, cave-black in the valleys, these wings fused to a peacock-blue stylus. The dying damselfly, shuddering in my palm, her body shining like a radio tube, like a bugle bead, like a Christmas ornament: blown glass lined with aluminum, cheap, yet carefully packed in its nest of crushed paper, waiting for next year.

SPECIMEN: SILK

One night, walking through the woods, I came across a spiderweb big as a hula hoop, anchored to two shortleaf pines. See the magnificent thing, fragile diamond sheet, the maker inverted and swaying, knitting up the gaps. Without pausing, she dropped from one spoke to another, pulling a strand taut, anchoring. The lines, close as a record’s grooves, shone violet and lime in the flashlight. She tatted a zigzag of thicker stuff down the middle: a decorative touch, because it delighted her.

SPECIMEN: BLACK OPALS

The camp-host couple showed me their collection that summer in Oregon. They found the stones in Nevada while sifting through a load of earth they’d bought from a mine. They kept the opals in a canning jar of mineral oil, so the pinfire wouldn’t fade. When he fished one out with his hard logger’s hand, I took it. Fevered walnut, sparking in my palm.

SPECIMEN: BLUE MORPHO

In the Wonder Room at the Menil Collection, just down the street from my apartment in Houston, was a Riker mount of a blue morpho—rare butterfly of the rain forest pressed under glass, resplendent but radically dead. The color of the butterfly’s wings shifted, from sapphire to tourmaline to amethyst.

Then in Costa Rica, on our honeymoon. He flashed between palm trees, lighted on leaves, drank juice from burst fruit. We watched him flicker through the woods with others of his kind. Here’s how much larger, more generous, the world can be.

THE IRIDESCENCE OF MEMORY

Take this a step further, when an image pierces the memory and bounces off an answering memory from the past, or a vision of the future. The optical phenomenon of iridescence—rainbows arcing from peacocks or blue morphos—begins with repeated reflections from translucent, ridged surfaces; when the viewer moves, the colors seem to change. The iridescence of memory happens when one image (physical) illuminates another (imagined): not quite a reflection, but a refraction. These visions, these flashes of color come again and again. How then must I live?

MEMORY: FLORENCE, ITALY

A gray Sunday in late winter: damp sheen on the cobblestones, the sharp smell of roasting chestnuts. The piazza wasn’t crowded; mass had ended hours before. I had just eaten a bowl of ribollita, something I often ordered, because it didn’t cost much: torn greens and beef-bone broth, poured over day-old bread. As I walked home, I saw an old man in a gray suit, leading a little boy by the hand. The boy watched the pigeons that jerked and clucked across the square, and when he said something to his grandfather, the old man looked down at him and smiled; maybe he even laughed in appreciation, I don’t remember. And suddenly I knew that in watching them I was seeing myself with my grandfather, gone then fifteen years—watching how we had been together, in a quiet corner of the world, unnoticed. Cared for by women who knew how to stretch a lean budget, how to make things last.

MEMORY: PRAGUE

After a month in Dresden, Prague looked like a stage set to me, partly an effect of the crenellated architecture, partly a trick of the light—clean, blue-yellow, I’d recognize it anywhere. I couldn’t get the history out of my head: April 1945, the Allies firebomb Dresden to the ground, sparing Prague because Winston Churchill had visited once and liked it.

I wandered through the historic district. Crystal beads sparkled in shop windows; I bought a ring carved from a piece of dark wood. As the afternoon waned, the vendors started rolling up their linens and necklaces. That’s when I saw her: the woman eating an ice-cream cone. Maybe seventy, she walked alone across the square, taking it all in with the delight of someone on holiday, the ease of someone who’d lived there forever. It’s not that she was dancing across the stones, but something about the way she walked said, Joy to the roots of my hair.

WHAT I WANT

To know what it means to live a biblical life, uncloistered every day. This is my book of new ritual, of learning to live a prophetic life in conjunction with another. Togetherness’s attraction and threat—the shared room, common air. My practice is observation. How do relationships illuminate?

SPECIMEN: PEARL

In the middle of March, a heavy, sticking snow fell, clinging to Norway firs and rooftop gutters, capping fire hydrants, rising like bread all over the city. So much for our trip to Florida. We slogged down the street to the café, comforted ourselves with wine. I was eating a mussel when I felt a chip of something in my mouth—grit?—but when I fished with my finger, I found a very small pearl. Outside, a man in a red truck skidded into a snowbank.

The storm started to let up. The sun lowered in a nacreous sky, and I wondered what it meant—that a pearl drops from my tongue like a coal afire, that I roll it on my glottal speech. Not carelessly to be swallowed. Not to be crushed between teeth.