Mental furniture and the role of nostalgia

Awhile back, I think on this blog, I made the observation that my long dead grandparents were still making brand purchase decisions for my household. I was reminded of that today in a roundabout way concerning the giant storm blanketing much of the country. My grandparents lived in Tulsa, OK since shortly after statehood, and if you click on the link above it takes you to an E-edition of the Tulsa World newspaper -- which for the first time in 106 years was unable to deliver a print edition due to the heaviest accumulation of snow in living memory.

For me, just the words "Tulsa World" immediately snap me back into my childhood, the taste of ultra-crisp bacon floods my mouth, and I can smell coffee and that bready smell that filled the kitchen because my grandmother always toasted her bread in the oven (funny how I never thought that was odd until just now) along with cake donuts. They had both grown up on farms, and remained rail thin their entire long lives, despite the enormous breakfasts that also included eggs, and sometimes biscuits and gravy, juice, and cereal.

In my memory, the kitchen is bright, as it always was, filled with the kind of light reflected from multiple gleaming surfaces, refracted and rebounding off the wooden floor, soaked up by the toile wallpaper, resting in the curtains pulled usually quite tightly against either the heat or the cold. It was almost always deep summer or high winter when I would visit, on vacation or Christmas holiday, so Tulsa for me was a place of extremes. My grandparents had, in the 66 years they lived in that house, created an enclosed system, a bio-dome of sorts, for their marriage.

For me, who grew up in the traditional late 20th century California landscape of fractured and badly put back together families, multiple moves, various religions, and caretakers who spoke different languages, this house would become my only touchstone of stability. Even today I can sink myself deep into my mind and recall the slightest detail, grooved over and over into my mind by the ritual polishing to totemic significance. I know that even with that level of engagement, I remember things that are somewhat hidden to me, partially because I might not have even know then names of them at the time. For example, I just now realized that Grandmother Handley had planted yellow gladiolus in the backyard, simply because I did not recognize them until acquiring the information long after they have likely been turfed up and disposed of.

Having a whole house of this detail in my head to escape to has made me aware of and interested in the concept of memory constructs or memory theaters, spaces in the mind created for the visual storage and access of more conceptual or abstract thought. One example is that, having read the entire works of Shakespeare and much of the Bible at their house during long, deadly summers spent lying on the terrazzo floor in front of an old fashioned fan, my knowledge of those is securely stored in the bookshelf of the den from where I had plucked those books. Unlike classical memory palaces, however, these associations are happenstance rather than a conscious production. This construct stores a lot of emotional information, formative information, like my sense of time, or fears vs safety.

There are moral aspects to living in this memory palace, because it is burnished with long use and freighted with nostalgia, there is an imperative sense to recreate it in the 'real world' and there I think my construct has begun to trip me up. I am not sure that the ontology of two people born over a hundred years ago is necessarily applicable to my present day, much as I might wish it was. It is one thing to allow them to pick my cookies for me, but I am not so sure they should be dictating how to live. Thoughts?