“Ames, Iowa is surrounded by cornfields, filthy rivers, and smaller towns I've joked about but never visited. The sun rises over a pasta factory and sets on miniature suburban developments. There's a big university. There's also a bike path that invariably (and inexplicably) smells like waffle syrup, fantastic drinking water, and the only cross-country course in the nation designed exclusively for cross-country races. I am a child of this place, and these details are naturally important to me. More than important, really—they are inseparable from my adolescence.”
I wrote that paragraph in August of 2008, beginning my first college assignment. The memories of Ames I describe are overwhelmingly positive, unnervingly bright. My intent was to connect the feeling of intensely happy memories to the libratory experience of wandering aimlessly. Observant walkers will often understand their surrounding areas with extreme emotional valence: the way two streets intersect, the placement of a swingset, of broken glass. I believe that to feel anything toward these objects or patterns, they must be evocative of memories, during which you felt something else. The area then becomes a surrogate for that previously experienced emotion and all its still-resonant weight and substance. To wander and be free, to some extent, is to remember and smile.
My sense of this since the summer of 2008 has been constantly developing. The essay’s main flaw was that it gave attention only to positive memories. But not all memories are happy and not all walks are freeing. More importantly, experiencing one’s surroundings with that intense resonance is less simple than recreating a past feeling and applying it to the present. The same intersection or swingset can be experienced as soothing or menacing, uplifting or bruising—same goes for the memories that inform these sensations.
This is all pretty logical, but my point is that the inherent ambiguity of memory doesn’t really change the “wandering” analogy. I believe that the whole ongoing, mangled process of remembrance is liberating, regardless of the emotional valence of the memory. Because these valences are constantly changing over time, living is both a process of creating memories and accumulating emotional perspective on existing memories. Every time you remember anything, you’re experiencing a unique and precious point in a continuum, since a life’s collective experience colors one’s understanding of the past.
This might not sound that libratory—why can’t events or objects just be, instead of becoming associative snowballs that resist characterization? I’m not saying that having mixed feelings about every experience is somehow superior. However, I do think that the events that happen to us do not end in real time: their meanings will constantly thicken and permutate until we stop thinking about them, because that’s what memories do. And this is why every step in the process is so interesting.
Feeling ambivalent toward an experience requires one to understand that experience in multiple dimensions, and it means that our consciousness has deemed this understanding somehow important by allowing that memory to remain. If you can still remember, you can still explore that memory and its potential to be moving—its capacity for ambivalence. If remembering is about exploring that capacity, then I think ambivalence signifies importance. And that’s pretty great. It’s a way to be reassured that events have meaning, even if you’re not completely sure what that meaning is.
This all goes back to the original point of this post: my characterization of Ames. A few weeks ago, I wrote some of my impressions from the summer of 2008. I hadn’t done that before, even though it’s been almost two years, and what I came up with is nothing like what I wrote that summer, for that first essay. Those memories were characterized one-dimensionally, and there is such a sense of conclusiveness to them. The happiness I felt on my last bike ride across town was happiness and would always be happiness.
Sure, conclusive interpretations are still valid. But, because I’m at a stage in which ambivalence is so seductive—seems so meaningful—it feels urgently important to express events as such. Maybe, in the future, I’ll feel something else about that summer, with an even greater sense of urgency. The prospect is exciting, but not exciting enough to ignore the task at hand. Here’s what I wrote:
“Do you ever associate certain periods of time with an image? Not necessarily something you even saw, but just something that aesthetically fits? To me, the summer of 2008 was a dark room, lit in the corner by one comically insufficient lamp, flickering. I spent a lot of time trying to laugh and a lot of time wondering why I was laughing. There were a couple of late night bike rides. These are more explicit memories: we’re riding down Northwestern, passing the last PBR back and forth, heading to Kum and Go because holy shit we need Doritos. The next morning there were crumbs in the driveway, and I tried to laugh.
There was also the robot dog, how its collar saved us. Was Ames actually so uptight that smoking in a gazebo was an act of resistance? To whom or what? Are adults still the enemy when we’re so close to independence and just want to put youth in its proper place and move the fuck on? The collar had these little blinking red lights, probably meant to protect it from people like us. We rode to Cub Foods, and I had to keep telling myself, “this is fun, this is fun, you will remember this.”
And then we were in the TV room. It’s weird. He lives alone, but there’s still a this-is-where-I-go-to-get-away-from-it-all vibe happening. Jesus Christ there are a lot of DVDs. And the two chairs are attached, cupholders in the center. He bought them with the expectation that someday there would be someone to fill that seat, and until then it would be worth having to decide between right or left. I usually chose right. It seemed so consequential, even if nobody else saw me.”
There’s more, but you get the idea. And, reading over them now, it’s clear how crucial it is that these were remembered now. It’s been long enough to contain the conflicting intensities of those moments, without forgetting how uncontainable they seemed at the time. Their ambivalence is so raw. It’s as if something inside of me now is shouting, “this is important, this is important, you should remember this.”
