THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORIES and by Rituals of Memory

UNIT 3

The Persistence of Memories & Rituals of Memory

Lesson Standards

10.1(A)

10.4(E)

10.2(A)

10.4(F)

10.2(B)

10.5(A)

10.5(C)

10.2(C)

10.5(D)

10.3

10.5(G)

10.4(B)

UNIT INTRODUCTION

In childhood, each new day seems like a brand new experience. At some point, however, we mature enough to realize that the past not only exists but also has a hold on us. The past also has something to teach us. Exploring the past helps us make wiser choices as we move forward in our lives.

• How does a person’s childhood shape the adult he or she becomes?
• What can we learn about ourselves by recollecting our memories and childhood dreams?
• Can we avoid certain mistakes in the future by learning about the past?

*Watch Unit Introduction Video

Blast Question:

• How does art capture a moment in history?

Should aspiring artists be taught older, more traditional movements when developing their own style?

• A. Yes. It is important that artists are aware of the movements that preceded them and have the opportunity to respond to, and play with, older styles.
• B. Maybe. It is important for artists to have a broad view of art history, but it is also important that they are not trying to copy what has been made before.
• C. No. Artists should not be influenced by older styles while capturing the moods, emotions and culture that they are living in.

It is 1936. A man comes on stage wearing a diving suit. He wields a billiard cue and leads in two dogs. As he lectures, he slowly starts to suffocate underneath the diving helmet, but it is a while before anyone rushes to his aid: they all think it is part of the show. After all, this is Salvador Dalí, a Spanish surrealist painter active during the twentieth century, a time when the world was still grappling with the aftermath of “the war to end all wars.” Luckily, the billiard cue is used to pry the helmet off Dalí’s head. The artist lives for another 53 years.

Surrealism was one of several artistic movements that emerged at the end of World War I, an era of disillusionment. Art is a product of the environment in which it is created. Its responses to significant events can give us an insight that’s different from the one in history books. Tragic events like World War I or the Spanish Civil War resulted in artists rejecting traditional, old-school ideas. These artists focused on the future instead, trying out new ways of expression. Dalí was one of the most famous artists engaging in surrealism, a style of art led by writer André Breton. Surrealists considered their art to be a revolt against traditional forms. They believed previous modes of art had only interpreted the world, while surrealism transformed it. Surrealism is characterized by a strange fusion of the fantastical and realistic. It often includes elements of the unconscious, memories, emotions and dreams, heavily influenced by the

psychoanalysis introduced by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. One of Dalí’s most famous paintings is The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting portrays melting clocks and swarming ants on a desolate landscape, symbolizing decay and the passage of time. Intentionally obscure, Dalí said it was meant to “systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” This was a sharp departure from the rationalism and realism society embraced before WWI. Industrialization, modernization and the atrocities of the war created a feeling that the world was changing.

Surrealists blamed the war and its consequences on bourgeois values, and were adamant that humankind would benefit from discarding rational thought for the unconscious. They also felt that current styles of art could not capture the violence and horror of war. According to Rice University art history professor Gordon Hughes, surrealist artists “tended to view traditional forms of image making or writing as wholly inadequate to the task of representing the experience of modern warfare… [it was an] effort to find a visual or written idiom that could represent, even if inadequately, what by its very nature cannot be represented.” In 1937, conflict triggered another radical artistic reaction. That year, the Spanish were embroiled in a civil war (1936-1939). Fascism, a political ideology characterized by radicalized nationalism and dictatorial power, was reaching its height in Spain, Germany and Italy.

Spain was fractured. To gain a foothold in the battles, Spanish general Francisco Franco enlisted the help of Nazi Germany to bomb the town of Guernica. This town, a stronghold for the opposition, was populated with civilians. The attack devastated Guernica. In reaction to the violence and suffering, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso painted Guernica, which became one of his most famous works, and marked a shift in Picasso’s artistic focus—his work became politicized. Depicted in black and white, Guernica showed the suffering felt in times of war. It used figures like bulls to represent darkness and doves to represent broken peace.

In the chaos of the painting, it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. This task is made more challenging by Picasso’s use of cubism, or breaking down realistic images into basic geometric forms. It forces viewers to impose their own meaning upon the painting. The choppy, shattered images capture the pain and sensation of death in ways that a realistic portrait might not. “Picasso knew exactly what he was doing when he painted Guernica ,” said British art critic Jonathan Jones. “He was trying to show the truth so viscerally and permanently that it could outstare the daily lies of the age of dictators.” What do you think? What do The Persistence of Memory and Guernica have in common? What can art teach us about the past? How does art capture a moment in history?

Write your blast:

What will our learning look like today?

Success Criteria

Learning Intention

Language Objective

• I will be able to identify and describe "Rituals of Memory" in literature.
• I will analyze the impact of these rituals on characters and themes.
• I will use academic vocabulary to discuss the concept.

• I will explore the concept of rituals of memory, examining their significance in literature and society.
• I will reflect on personal and cultural rituals of memory, and practice presenting our thoughts using academic language.

I will use academic vocabulary to describe and discuss 'Rituals of Memory' in literature."

Do Now:

• What is a memory or a tradition that you hold dear?
• How does it make you feel?"

Introduction

Kimberly Blaeser (b. 1955) is an essayist and poet who worked as a journalist prior to receiving her PhD at University of Notre Dame. Blaeser, whose parents are of German and Anishinaabe descent, was raised on the White Earth Reservation and is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. In 2017, she became poet laureate of Wisconsin due to her contributions and achievements in literature. Much of Blaeser’s work explores Native American identity and culture. In this essay, she examines the way her mixed heritage and cultural influences came together to impact her as a child. *Watch StudySync Video

• One of the most famous artistic depictions of the topic of memory is The Persistence of Memory by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

• The painting’s bizarre imagery lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Some critics see the human face in the middle of the piece as an abstract self-portrait and the ants in the bottom left portion as a symbol of decay because they consume the red clock. The painting depicts an imaginary landscape that is perhaps reminiscent of a dream.

The painting connects with Blaeser’s essay because both pieces depict the nonlinear nature of time. For Blaeser, time is circular because our memories bring us back to our origins. In Dalí’s painting, the melting clocks can be interpreted as symbolizing the way time feels altered when a person is dreaming.

Generating Questions:

Before, during, and after reading, generate questions to deepen your understanding of the text. To do so, use sentence frames such as the following to ask open-ended, higher-level-thinking questions about the text:

• Before reading: What might this text suggest about fill in the blank_____?
• During reading: Why is fill in the blank_____ important?
• After reading: What are the implications of fill in the blank______?

Analyzing Vocabulary:

For each boldfaced word, annotate to supply a possible meaning, and then use print or digital resources to clarify and validate the meaning. For multiple-meaning words, use context to determine the intended meaning.

Vocabulary

intricate

having a complex pattern, involving many pieces

emerge

to become known or apparent

deduce

to conclude by reasoning

oblivious

lacking mindfulness; unaware

tangible

a material object

Rituals of Memory

Memory begins with various wonders. For my friend Mary, it began with hair. Her hair grew tightly curled, so strong the spirals defied taming. Brushing and combing brought tears. When Mary tried to run her fingers through her hair as she saw others do, her fingers became hopelessly captured by the curls: Hair, she deduced, must grow in loops, out of our head at one point, back into it at another. Because her locks had never been cut, the loops never broken, her fingers became entangled in the loops. Perhaps that story delights me because it stands as a wonderful example of our always innocent attempts to explain the world. Or perhaps because it seems a fine metaphor for the looped relationships of family, place, and community, the innate patterns of ourselves that always keep us returning. No matter how long our lives, no matter how far our experience takes us from our origins, our lives remain connected, always loop back to that center of our identity, our spirit. I believe we belong to the circle and, for our survival, we will return in one way or another to renew those rhythms of life out of which our sense of self has emerged. Some of us have a physical place and a people we return to. We also have what Gerald Vizenor calls the “interior landscapes” of our imaginative and spiritual lives. Perhaps our strongest link to the sacred center, the pulsing core of being, is memory and the storytelling and ceremonies that feed it— our own rituals of memory. My memories entangle themselves oddly among the roots of several cultures: Native American, perhaps foremost in my mind, but also a German Catholic background, the culture of rural America, the close looping of small towns in the Midwest, and what I guess could be called Minnesota wilderness culture. But these several

cultures did not always exist in opposition or in isolation from one another. I remember Memorial Day celebrations when my father joined the Legionnaires in their visits to all the graveyards in Mahnomen and Nay-Tah-Waush. Uniformed, sometimes sweating in the early summer heat, they marched to the sites, stood at attention as taps was played, and then, as a gesture of salute to the fallen veterans, they shot over the graves. Each year, through late morning and early afternoon, we followed the men on these tours. We stood, moved to goose bumps by the lonely trumpet tune, scrambling with all the other children for spent casings when each ceremony was concluded. The last site on their schedule was the Indian burial grounds close to the BAB landing. As a child I saw nothing unusual about a dozen American Legionnaires marching back on the little wooded path and paying solemn respect to those Indian warriors who I would later realize were really of another nation. On this march through the tall grasses and hazelnut bushes that crowded the path, my older brother and I often fell in step. Several times I marched beside Sig Tveit and his trumpet, his arm linked through mine. We stood, all of us—those descended from settlers of Norwegian, German, or other European origins, and those descended from Anishinaabe or other Indian people. Together in a moment out of ordinary time, we paused in the little opening at the wooden grave houses, oblivious to the wood ticks, which must later be picked carefully from our clothes and our flesh, oblivious to the buzzing of mosquitoes or sand flies, oblivious as well to the more trivial tensions of contemporary politics. We stood together in a great ceremonial loop of our humanity, in our need to remember our ancestors and the lives they lived, together in our desire to immerse ourselves in their honor, to always carry those memories forward with us, to be ourselves somehow made holy by the ritual of those memories. We emerged quiet

from those little woods, from that darker place of memory, into the too bright sunshine of a late May day in the twentieth century. And then we arrived back at the sandy beach. The men brought out drinks from the trunks of their cars, laughter and talk sprang up, picnic foods came out, and people would disperse again—to their own families. I don’t know if the Legionnaires still march back into the woods each year. I like to believe they do. For that kind of experience has helped me keep balance when the strands of my mixed heritage seem to pull one against another. However unconscious, it was a moment of crossover, a moment when the borders of culture were nullified by the greater instincts of humanity to remember and to give honor. Perhaps the Memorial Days of those early years have become one of the watermarks of my life because they brought to ceremonial focus the many tellings of the past that filled up the hours and days of my childhood. As children, we were never so much taught as storied. All work and play had memories attached. “Indians,” Ed Castillo says, “can hold more than one thing sacred.” With school being my double life. I went to Catholic grade school, where I earned a reputation for being quiet, obedient, pious, and bright. I learned my Baltimore Catechism—“Who made you?”

“God made me” “Why did God make you” “God made me because he loves me.” —learned my singsong phonics— ba be bi bu, ca ci ca cu, da de di da du —studied my spelling— i before e, except after c, or when it sounds like a as in neighbor and weigh. In between school days, we gathered hazelnuts, went partridge hunting, fished, had long deer-hunting weekends, went to powwows, went spearing and ice fishing, played canasta and whist, learned the daisy chain, beaded on looms, made fish house candles, sausage, and quilts. No one then questioned the necessity or value of our school education, but somehow I grew up knowing it wasn’t the only—maybe not even the most important— education I would need, and sometimes we stole time from that education for the other one. My parents might keep us home from school or come and get us midday for some more lovely adventure on a lake or in the woods. I’m still thankful for those stolen moments, because now I know by heart not only the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and the National Anthem, but the misty prayers water gives off at dawn and the ancient song of the loon: I recognize not only the alphabet and the parts of the English sentence, but the silhouetted form of the shipoke and the intricate language of a beaver’s teeth and tail. My life at school and in the Catholic Church is officially recorded and documented—dates of baptism, First Communion and confirmation, quarterly grade reports, attendance records— just as my academic life is later documented at universities in Minnesota, Indiana, and Wisconsin. But for my other education, practical and spiritual, I have no grades or degrees, no certificates to commemorate the annual rituals. I have some tangibles of those processes—a jingle dress, fans of feathers, sometimes photos—but mostly I have stories, dreams, and memories.

Summary

When she was young, Kimberly Blaeser had a friend with tight, curly hair that she believed grew in loops. She still remembers this because it’s an innocent way of explaining the world: looping back to the place one comes from, a place both literal and figurative. This figurative world is the “interior landscape” of one’s memory and spiritual life. Blaeser’s memories are a mix of traditions—Native American, German Catholic, and Midwestern. On Memorial Day, Blaeser would follow the Legionnaires as they visited graveyards to honor fallen veterans. The day ended at the Indian burial grounds, where she stood solemnly watching the ceremony with her friends of different descents. Blaeser describes learning Catholic school lessons, while at home being taught about ice fishing, quilting, and making sausage. Her practical and spiritual education remains as important to her as her academic one.

Vocabulary Drag & Drop

Given a set of vocabulary words from the essay, you will 'drag' the correct definition and form to your chart and create an original sentence in the 4th column.

Quiz

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