Surrendering to Memory

How Reflex Arc ruined my life for a week, and what to do about it if it happens to you.

August 14, 2023

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But what is it

Whenever I start to feel trapped I escape to an art museum. People have described how trying to imagine the infinite expanse of space and all the galaxies within can create existential crisis akin to a panic attack. Art museums are the broad opposite for me: staring at a 400 year old painting shrinks history the way folding a piece of paper brings its two furthest points on top of each other. I usually feel nothing when I look at these types of works except the relief that I don’t have to be a realist paid exclusively by the Church to crank out depictions of Mary while living a pained existence on the brink of poverty.

And then I saw the painting. It’s tucked away in the American wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum, upstairs, in a smaller gallery next to Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. It’s not very big—I’d say just a few feet tall—but there was something in the painter’s use of red that immediately pulled me in and gave me a stomach ache for a week straight. I found a photo someone took of this painting for their blog and posted it here, as a direct representation of how that would have looked to me at the time I saw it a year ago:

It’s hard to describe what’s in the painting—the background seems to be a gray building with oddly shaped rectangles as stand ins for windows, and in front of it there seems to be some sort of cursed scaffolding angled strangely with cool blue and blood red cloth twisted and tied all around it. The scaffolding is almost reminiscent of a crucifix, but then again, maybe it’s a ship’s rigging. In either case, there’s something deeply unsettling about how everything in the frame looks familiar while being unidentifiable.

There aren’t many images of this painting online, which feels odd. Famous paintings are pop culture artifacts used on postcards and printed on puzzles, a cultural hegemony that feels impossible to avoid. When I got home I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about this painting and tried to look up information about it. You can read all about Kay Sage, an American who traveled through Europe as a child and eventually was adopted by the surrealist movement in Paris. But there’s not much online about Reflex Arc. At first I was a little worried. I wanted to understand what I was looking at and why it seemed to haunt me.

The power of this painting is in its immediate emotional impact—that is to say, the work speaks for itself. I can’t imagine someone reading a short story I’ve written and needing to know more about my intention behind writing it to feel connected to it or not. If Reflex Arc makes me feel uneasy, the most natural human impulse is to figure out why. It’s a therapy tool: if you can name your demons, you can exert control over them. We also used to believe that literally.

I’m trying to ignore that impulse more and more as I cycle through books and movies, too. Making sense of a tricky ending is a form of self soothing. But it’s also a way to try and exert mastery over a work that you didn’t create. Sitting with whatever emotional current you have zipping along your nervous system is a harder way to process your emotions, but it’s a gateway to creativity as well. The more background details about the author or director or artist you learn, the more you can contextualize their mindset. Sometimes, in those moments, the power of the art itself fades away.

I still think about Reflex Arc on a weekly basis. Some days I’m tempted to find a book on Kay Sage and pore through it, searching for any nugget of information about what it is and why she painted it. As soon as I do, though, the painting’s spell will be broken. Instead, I try my hardest to wipe away the details I know. I want to forget what year she painted it. I want to erase any sense of the artist’s identity. I want to let my eyes trace up the rigid poles draped haphazardly and sink into whatever feeling is gurgling inside of me.

It’s from that place that logic tends to falter and my own concrete ideas of self fall away. It’s a bit like unzipping an outer protective layer and standing raw, like an exposed nerve, feeling everything. The less I know about the art becomes the more I know about myself. And the more in tune I am with my emotional core, the better I am at writing.

Read

I’m pretty terrible at reading things online these days. I quit using Twitter because, well, obvious reasons, and I had the awful realization that all my online article recommendations came from links. Bad spot to be in for an Internet writer. But I did catch this piece going around a bit the other day and it’s well worth your time to read. And it’s a great reminder that you should just be bookmarking good sites and reading what they put out. In this interview, Jaya Saxena asks Anya von Bremzen about the backbreaking labor of traditional tortilla making and how traditional foods can become commodified by tourists while ignoring the conditions required to produce them. Really made me think hard about what I prioritize as a food tourist.

Watch

Four guys drive leaking dynamite through a jungle to put out an oil derrick fire for a big payday. This one’s been on my list for a long, long time, and I finally took the effort to sit down and watch it. Boy does it deliver. The premise is based on the book The Wages of Fear, which was also a movie in the 50s, but Friedkin spends a lot of this movie focusing in on the four main characters and what drove them to accept this gig in the first place. It’s shot beautifully, and the whole thing rides an edge of tension that truly makes your stomach hurt every minute they’re in the trucks. The action is compelling, but what Sorcerer does incredibly well is build the quiet moments between the action. It’s a pretty slow movie with not very much dialogue, and that makes it feel infinitely rewatchable.

Listen

High On Fire has always lived in the world of “what if Matt Pike from Sleep started doing amphetamines instead of just smoking weed?” Their debut album, The Art of Self Defense, was a stellar delivery on that promise but suffered from murky production and muddy mastering. As much as I liked the songs on it, I always found this album to be unlistenable with how poor everything sounded. Welp, not anymore! The remastered version sounds incredible—the guitars are punchier, the bass is heavier, and the drum tracks have way more clarity so now every cymbal hit isn’t just a clanging mess. It’s worth checking out, especially in preparation for a new High On Fire record in the works that features Coady Willis (Big Business, Murder City Devils) on drums.

Consume

Wisconsin summer produce is pretty incredible, and the Dane County Farmer’s Market attracts growers from all over the state. Just to the west of Madison is the Driftless area full of hills valleys and rich soil due to lack of glacial drift, but to the northeast is Door County. Jutting out into the water, the Door County peninsula has a temperate microclimate created by Green Bay (the bay, not the city) to the west and Lake Michigan to the east. The cooler winds blowing up and over the land help cherries ripen slower, producing dense, sweet cherries that fall right off the pit when split. This doesn’t help you very much if you don’t live in Wisconsin, but I encourage you to seek out whatever local produce thrives in the climate you live in and relish in it.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here.