The Pressure of the Past

Life usually falls into a set measure that follows a benign circular pattern of waking up, performing a standard daily set of activities, and winding down to slumber. My day is mostly consumed by my career as a technician at Clarrington, a local university. I set up equipment to perform experiments that determine when and how materials fail by applying increasingly severe pressure. Sections of structures I test have included those composed of reinforcing beams designed for novel aircraft wings and side panels of new car designs. The professors and their students develop detailed theoretical models to predict this behavior and publish papers filled with fancy equations that stretch across pages. But it is to my lab where they come to see if their theories are correct. As the specimens are loaded they, at first, simply sit in the testing machine unmoving and unchanging while silently building up internal stresses to resist the load. All materials are imperfect; their atomic structure exhibits a characteristic strength that is dependent on  the unavoidable distribution of interior regions that are weakened due to defects resulting from the initial processing of the material. This is the ‘weakest-link’ concept of material performance. As critical pressures are neared, the material can crackle as small local failures occur at these weakened regions and the load redistributes by flowing around these areas. Ultimately there is no longer any possible way to adjust to the pressure and, almost instantaneously, a crescendo of inner breakdowns result. Usually the components fail with a loud *BANG*, sometimes flying explosively apart in small pieces or grotesquely folding in on itself to become crushed and flattened. But this is the answer that Nature gives when asked the question of how some part of our world works: when exactly does a particular structural component fail when it’s ability to resist loads is lost? This is what has always attracted me to the lab; it is an oracle of sorts through which we can converse with Nature. No matter how aesthetic a theory can be, how beautifully derived and clearly expressed, it is only a construct of the human mind and possesses no inherent truth. But the tests that I perform in my lab yield the truth, which Nature whispers or screams out with a shattering finality. I enjoy this purity, this definitiveness, this infallibility, and irrevocable sanctity of experimental results. I suppose I’ve come to view the world as an intricate experiment – at least this is how I view my life – and I try to look below the surface of man-made things to hopefully catch a fleeting glimpse of some ultimate reality. Nature speaks in many ways and I am desperate in my attempts to listen.           

My name is Jim and I live alone. This life may be unsuited for most, but it is actually quite agreeable to me. As is customary and what has become my routine, for the part of the day that is bounded by the beginning of my evening and ending when I shuffle off to sleep, I retire to my Study. I enjoy the solitude and quietness of closing the door to the room that is filled with my books, momentos, my desk and PC, and my framed reproductions of well known artists that seem to softly look at me as I gently regard them. I typically immerse myself in the usual activities of going through the daily mail, reading the local newspaper, studying a technical paper, or, occasionally, visiting the vastness of the Internet. I enjoy the Study immensely, as I seem to fit into it as a hand in a glove, and I feel a welcome, comforting support with which any tension within seems to drift away and I can truly relax. And so it has gone, my daily routine, repeating uniformly over time with a clock-like enumeration of years that, of course, offers little but a final finite tally. But mortality is part of nature and, in this regard, it can be of comfort to know that its questioning cannot yield an answer; it simply is.

One day, a lab assistant of mine came to work and discretely told some of us that her mother had passed away. For those of us who were in her circle of close friends, we were supportive and offered condolences for her loss. She was thankful and wistfully told us some little anecdotes about her departed mother. One thing she said made me listen attentively; she recalled as a child that her mother told her of the importance of friends and of the idea of research that would play a part in benefiting the world by discovering new things. She felt that those early memories were what shaped her path in life to eventually find the greatest sense of fulfillment by working as a technician in a laboratory at an important university engaged with others endeavoring towards obtaining accurate data from the various tests we conducted.

Some days after my assistant recounted the influence of her early experiences on her career, on an otherwise unspecial evening and so contrary to my usual routine and customary state of mind, I was overcome with a bout of overwhelmingly interfering reminiscences. These reminiscences did not jump to some definitive recollection but seemed to hover, in a bizarre manner, around a specific time and place in my youth. These memories came to mind with some obscure purpose; they avoided the common cache of memory that holds various sets of recollections that constitutes the circularity of my adult life. Instead, these unexpected and particular reminiscences came in a strange fashion in that they began with memories, surprisingly not forgotten, with a vague thematic content and evolved during a time of strange occasions when I was a teenager. They did not delve into a core memory but seemed to lead me slowly into recollecting facts and sensations of times, places and encounters surrounding some special incident or incidents. In examining these recollections, I felt that I could simply not recall what the emphasis was but, instead, had to first investigate related memories that revolved around some suspected repressed event. Each internal investigation usually ended with a mental shrug of unsuspected interest but ultimate lack of pertinence, but each episode presented a hint and an obscure mental link to a new recollection that led deeper into this whole, strange, and unnerving mental process. I seemed to be approaching something of my past that I had pushed aside or had buried by necessity.       

I immediately adopted this exploration into my daily routine; after finishing various standard duties in my Study, I would set everything aside, lean back in my chair, and resurrect pursuing the evolving chain of recollections that had been terminated the prior evening. However, it slowly became clear that these reminiscences did not seem to aim at a particular incident but to a set of experiences, united by an obscure thematic correspondence, that connected different times and places. Pursuing these mental investigations were initially associated with a feeling of fear and anxiety – which were probably the conscious delivery of the emotional content that these memories contained, conveyed through alternate pathways through the complex machinery of the mind.

These episodes evolved into a dizzying spiral of connected thoughts and memories. Snapshots of these mentations formed a collage that could possibly display a pattern if seen from afar, but up close, this pattern was undecipherable and could only be experienced as a vague sense of connectivity. This mosaic started with a reflection on my parents who were born and raised in Europe to large families, and who independently moved to the States when they were in their late teens. They met, married and raised a family (I have two sisters) in Illinois. While they had married, my inception resulted ironically in a divorce, namely for me from the bulk of my relatives who remained in Europe. Forgotten memories arose on my near yearly trips overseas to visit with my aunts, uncles and cousins who were vibrant and happy and became almost mythical to me as I only saw them in the special glow of vacation periods.

My reminiscences tracked to my mother’s family who lived in the Norwegian coastal town named Grimstad. One of her seven sisters had a boy and three girls, cousins that I enjoyed being with and who reciprocated a familial warmth whenever I was there. Other memories slowly made their appearance. One of the girls named Mariann, near enough to my age, was gorgeous and possessed a gentle, warm and exuberant personality. We spent a lot of time together heading out to beaches, movies, and restaurants, sometimes with some of my other cousins or sometimes just us alone. I knew she felt similarly close to me and, during special moments, I would glimpse my eyes reflected back in hers. I had always basked in a sense of kinship and relatedness to my ‘Norwegian family’, and always felt a loss when I had to return back home. But, in retrospect, there was something particularly magical about Mariann. It’s difficult to describe but there was a specifically distinct brightness to her, like the sun just increased its intensity slightly giving her visage a more perfect texture such as in a classical painting. And there was a musical aspect to her limited and accented English that completed the hint of an otherworldly being.

As I think back on our encounters, I think about the decisions of life in which alternative paths are presented and a choice must be made. These choices form the path that our lives follow and I think of Mariann as symbolic of a decision in which I had to decide whether I would stay in the magical world that existed in Norway or continue back to the unknown continuation of my life back home. In some way her memory seems to me now as a gentle scepter, a visitation of some guiding physical construct sent by God that was placed before me to force a critical decision. In the fracture pattern of possible life paths that we select to follow, so often we blindly let the sum of momentum and gravity in our current situation decide for us. Without better wisdom or considered enlightenment, I, once again, ended my routine visitation and headed back to rejoin the life I had been leading.

During the last of my yearly sojourns (I was graduating college and was about to accept a position in a university laboratory), Mariann had become engaged to a well-to-do fellow but, amazingly, had expressed to me that she was actually averse to the marriage. Grimstad was a small town and, while the eager boys there were respectable and quite civilized, they were still from a small-town society, whereas by marrying into a wealthy family life could, conceivably, offer so much more. It was soon thereafter that I stopped hearing from Mariann, which I understood, and, in my heart, I wished her well.

And then the years intervened and I lost most all contact with the rest of my distant family who slowly began to form a fairy tale in my mind where everyone was eternally young, happy, and satisfied. I suppose that made me associate them with other fairy tales from childhood and to slowly avoid thinking of this particular tale – as I do others memories from my childhood – but particularly because this tale would tend to make me especially melancholy. These memories, for some reason, did not jump into my mind in a connected sequence but seemed to require some processing during my nighttime sleep after an interlude of evening introspection. This evolution of introspection leading to some suppressed secret seemed to require the action of dream machinery to awaken the next connection of tenuously linked memory fragments into my consciousness.

My mother, who has passed, would keep me informed of her family with whom she exchanged occasional letters. She once said that Mariann had married soon after I had left in that last year of my visitations and had, very soon thereafter, given birth to a son. She said that Mariann had always liked my name and had convinced her husband to pass it along to their child, “little Jimmy.” While at first I found this novel and cute, my reminiscences tended to fixate on this particular recollection and it caused me a completely unreasoned sense of distress and unease. During one particular night, I experienced a sleep where I drifted once more towards the central theme of my memories, but I awoke with an overwhelming sense of fear and urgency, and sat up in the darkness wondering until sunrise what had caused this feeling. Thereafter I became more anxious about the contemplation of a potentially hidden memory.  Further remembrances from this time seemed to evaporate as I seemed to be nearing some irrevocably conflicted central memory and, thus, I no longer was able to obtain a waking clue to the next chain of this progressive recollection. Perhaps I had reached my ‘destination’ and, while the details remain inaccessible, the associated feelings were still able to flow through the barrier.

After this incident I would no longer awaken with any new connections to forgotten recollections that I could use to continue my evening investigations into my past. And the other prior memories that had been uncovered and had led me on this vague voyage towards some sort of discovery seemed to fade as if part of a half-remembered dream. When I now think about Mariann, I feel that I enjoyed being with her and my other cousins, but I just don’t really recall any of this clearly any more. However I find in thinking of her life, with husband and son, a generally vicarious pleasantness but, inextricably, thoughts of Little Jimmy fill me with a completely absurd sense of wariness. Overall these inner searches fill me with a vague and disquieting need to avoid these memories in order to maintain the semblance of a mildly pleasant mood during the wakeful hours in my circle of life.

I have stopped my sessions of introspective reminiscences and continue my daily routine. However, now, when I come home in the evening and unsteadily close the door to my study, I have become increasingly aware of unease in my sense of being. I attend to my usual minor affairs with a certain detachment. As I scan my surroundings, my eye is unfailingly drawn to an 1893 painting by Edvard Munch of a vague figure in some state of distress. It had always held a certain warmth of familiarity but now had developed an aspect of both a mirror and a portal, seemingly trying to explain to me the need to uncover some kind of personal truth. Somehow the nature of my unconscious mind appears to be trying to speak to me just as the nature of the physical world speaks to me in my lab. I try to listen but cannot clearly hear the message and I may, unfortunately, never discern this truth before my circle completes its rotation. However, while I feel its mounting severity of pressure and try to adjust to it by avoiding the vague memories suggested by it, I find my unease continuously compounded by this portrait from a past century as it seems to look at me with some kind of ever increasing expectation and urgency.

To this I can only respond by closing my eyes tightly and involuntarily huddling protectively in my chair. While not allowed the salubrious softness of sleep, I remain in a twilight state of intermittency and am aware of an unceasing rush of subconscious thoughts leading me careening towards some inescapable knowledge.