Sense Memory

Personal objects, and associated smells, texture, weight, color, and sometimes sounds from our distant past, can, if remembered with unexpected clarity, trigger strong emotion. I'll give two examples, one from fiction based on a real life event, and another from yearly forest fire coverage shown on television.

In the former, taken from Swan's Way, the first book of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the character of the narrator remembers the smell of cake dipped in tea by his mother from when he was young. That smell brings back (hence the phrase 'Sense Memory' in acting theory) a flood of forgotten memories of the past. Every year in California News on television shows interviews with victims of forest fires standing in front of the remains of their homes. With amazing regularity weeping, deeply shaken home owners mourn the most, after pets, the loss not of their late model vehicle, but the loss of their photo albums. Our photo albums are beyond price because very often they are our only source of our emotions from the past that otherwise might be lost forever.

As a result of these truths from life, sense memory has been used to teach acting by several famous acting teachers, including Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen. What's most valuable about working from that method is that it is reliable, and not prone to disappear as so often does 'inspiration,' and simply not show up when most needed.

In order to dig deep from the use of "Personal Objects" what's needed and wanted is physical relaxation achieved by the work described in my previous entry.

Forgive, please, the too didactic tone inadvertently adopted here today; it's raining sweetly and memories are flooding back, so I'm beside myself. In a way you make this possible.

Barry