Masailand, 2006.  A scene that could have occurred in 1906, or 1806, or… But memories are more real than any photograph.

By Terry Wieland

Dreaming, Remembering, Reliving

Three levels of fantasy

In a column for Esquire in 1935, called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Ernest Hemingway reflected on the mechanics of writing and, in particular, how to recreate action so as to have your reader experience it as you did.

The key, he told the Maestro— “Mice,” for short, a young man who’d traveled to Key West to seek advice from the master—is to relive the event, isolate the specific thing that caused your emotion and, if you then describe it truly enough, you will evoke the same emotion in your reader.  Hemingway’s example was watching the fishing line strip as a big fish ran, and the line rising into the air and squeezing out the water so it hung in drops, refracting the sunlight.

I read that first in 1977—I can remember exactly where and when, but I won’t belabor it—and took it to heart as I attempted to write serious literature in the years that followed.  First, I learned that reliving, and simply remembering, are two different things.  Those who relive and then recreate, on paper, are a world away from those who merely remember and describe.

For the record, the former is exhausting.  At the end of a morning, you may be completely wrung out and have one short paragraph to show for it. The latter is considerably less taxing, depending on the writer’s determination to do it well, which is why we have good writers, bad writers, and those who should never touch a keyboard.

In 1988, I hunted Alaska brown bears on Montague Island and, some months later, attempted to recreate the incident in a magazine article.  It entailed less than 60 seconds of action as the bear came in fast, responding to a deer call, and finally dropped, five shots later, with its neck broken.  In attempting to relive that event, I learned that one can, through a process almost of self-hypnosis, relive something but (in my case at least) one can do it only three times.  After the third time, it becomes merely remembering.

Something similar occurred, attempting to relive a very hot few moments with a Cape buffalo high on Mount Longido in 1993.

Sometime in the early 1970s, Gene Hill, who wrote for Guns & Ammo and later for Field & Stream, made a safari in Kenya.  He loved Africa, and after he got home he kept his bags still partly packed with his Africa gear, just in case he got a last-minute invitation to return.  This remained in his closet until after Kenya closed hunting in 1977 and he knew he would never go back—not, at least, to the places he’d been and remembered with a fondness so fierce it resembled Humbert Humbert’s feelings for Lolita.

Hill, an extremely gifted writer, wrote about finally unpacking his things, surrendering to the reality that the dream could never come true.  Not now.  The Kenya he’d hunted, and experienced, and grown to love, was gone.  All he had left were dreams.  At least, he called them dreams.

Reading that piece, now almost 50 years later, I began reflecting on the difference between dreams—anticipation of things that may never come—and memories—recollection of things that really happened.  And, finally, the reliving of an event the way Hemingway described it.

As age has crept up on me, I find myself, usually in the early afternoon, feeling the need to sprawl in a nice chair and close my eyes, just for a bit.  Very rarely do I actually fall asleep, so this hardly qualifies as the much-storied “nap.”  I do, however, descend the cosmic stairs toward nap-dom, one step at a time, and occasionally enter a realm, in the infinitesimal interface between sleeping and waking, that is like time travel.

It’s not a dream and it’s never long; it’s a snatch, a snippet—a glimpse at a real place, that I really experienced, years before.  The glimpse is brief, but so intense as to be almost painful.  The water of the lake is real water, the smell of the juniper is real, and the ferns in the hot sun.  Rarely is there any action, just a vivid image lasting only seconds, after which I always jerk back to consciousness, and I am often panting.

Never having been hypnotized, I can’t say if this is similar.  From what I’ve read, it appears to be.  Sometimes I can sort of will it to happen, but more often as I drift off my mind wanders and suddenly, there I am—in a tent in Africa in the early morning, with the ever-present cooing of doves, or walking into a biltong shop in Pretoria and smelling the droewors.  And the smell of treated canvas, like old tents?  Back in the army, back in a campground at the age of eight, back in the Okavango.  Could be any of them.  Ah, but that old canvas smell!

Sometimes it can be sparked by a whiff of gunpowder or, more usually, a spice.  The merest sniff of cumin and other, mysterious, spices can put me back in the open market in Kampala in 1971— a world that has truly disappeared—and the smell of creosote, well, we won’t go into that.  But if you can’t imagine creosote as an aphrodisiac, think again.

The most famous instance of this phenomenon in literature is Marcel Proust and his taste of a madeleine cake dipped in lime tea that brought forth all the memories recounted in Remembrance of Things Past—all seven wondrous volumes—and in the outdoor field, closer to home, Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy series in Field & Stream in the 1950s.

Memories sparked by an aroma are, of course, a different thing than the deliberate drawing of one’s self back into an event in order to isolate the emotional center, à la Hemingway.  In that case, I found, if you do it only twice, leaving the third and last time for a later date, then you always have it, like a diamond tucked away for safe keeping.  It’s always available to be taken out and relived, but you never do it, because then you wouldn’t have it anymore.

This is, I know, a long way from Gene Hill’s Field & Stream column about dreaming of Africa, and remembering, and—in his case—regretting that which once was and would never be again.

The truth is, and I hate having to quote Thomas Wolfe, who wrote only one memorable thing in his word-drenched life, and that a title, but you can’t go home again.  No, really, you can’t.  Many have tried, and maybe that’s why children today never want to leave home in the first place.  But once gone, we quickly learn that what we left ceased to exist the moment we left it.

My Kampala of 1971, or Nairobi of 1972, or even, most recently, 1999.  The Okavango in 1990?  The Rift in 2006?  Gawd, I even remember when downtown Johannesburg was a pleasant place, and the Carlton Hotel in the center of town, with its pinball arcade in the bottom floor, attracted the little black African kids off the street, and they would challenge us to pinball matches and always win.  They were pinball wizards worthy of The Who, and I learned a few words of Xhosa and Zulu, long since buried, and I wonder where they are now?

One time, I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and was instantly transported to a campfire outside Gaborone, grilling mutton on sticks.  I want to say the wood then was acacia, and there are varieties of acacia in America, so the firewood must have been some of that.  Where it came from I have no idea, and it passed as quickly as it came.  More’s the pity.

Speaking of wood, sand a piece of walnut and you’ll find me back in my parents’ basement in the 1960s, refinishing the stock on a Cooey .22.  Or melt some linotype for bullets and I’ll be in the composing room of the newspaper where I started out way back when, and everything will be bright in spring and everything will be possible, because that’s the way it is when you’re 19.

They say your sense of smell is the strongest link to memory, and I have found nothing to dispute that.  Hearing—music—is a distant second, while sight and touch do not figure at all.

What I’ve learned from all this is that our memories long outlast even the most pleasurable experience.  They are a world, however, that most people never bother to really, truly, explore.  Which is unfortunate cuz, I hate to tell you, eventually that’s all you’ll have, and a little practice ahead of time never hurts.  It’s all I have left of the Africa I knew.