155. Mind Map – Carmen Radley
This mind map helped me recover long forgotten details and took me to unexpected places.
After the novelist Philip Roth died in 2018, I came across a short tribute Zadie Smith wrote to him. I’m not particularly a Roth fan, but I was charmed by the piece, especially the opening anecdote, where Smith recounted a conversation she had with Roth about swimming laps, something they both enjoyed doing. When Roth asked Smith what she thought about as she swam, she said, “I think, first length, first length, first length, and then second length, second length, second length. And so on.”
His answer was wildly different: “I choose a year. Say, 1953. Then I think about what happened in my life or within my little circle in that year. Then I move on to thinking about what happened in Newark, or New York. Then in America. And then if I’m going the distance I might start thinking about Europe, too. And so on.”
When I first read this, I couldn’t imagine having such recall. Could I give that a shot?
In 1953, Roth was twenty. On a page in my journal, I wrote out the year I was twenty. From radiating spokes, I wrote: Austin (where I was attending college), and the name of my high school boyfriend (with whom I’d reconciled that spring). I wrote Sour Lake (my hometown where I returned for the summer, in part for the boyfriend).
Each new word conjured some of its own, like from Sour Lake: Lamar University, the local college where I took summer classes; avoiding my best friend; Tropical Storm Allison, which flooded the city of Houston and my car (I’d left the windows down, and a sour smell set in, never left). With only slight pressing, I could remember outfits I loved and people I hadn’t thought of in two decades. In the course of remembering, I naturally moved to national and even world events.
All to say, this mind map helped me recover long forgotten details and took me to unexpected places.
I’ve found I can do this not only with periods of time, but also with people and places. I can do it with a favorite word, like pilfer: immediately I’m three years old, at the grocery store with my mother, caught with a balloon tucked tightly in my fist.
The experience is strange and wonderful: spatial rather than linear. It’s associative, surprising, even exhilarating. It mines the memory for things long buried—maybe to be used in fiction or memoir, maybe simply cherished as a recovering of the past.
– Carmen Radley
