Based on The Persistence of Memory (featured above) by Salvador Dalí
When he was young, he loved to study the rugged cliffside of his native country by the coast. His eye traced the broken top of each cliff down the jagged fissures through their walls right to the water’s edge. Sitting still and quiet, he took in the bright light crowning the cliffs and the tawny hue descending their sides; then the rocky, olive hills beyond them running to the shore and the gray stone outcrop at their base; he noted the strong shadows that set one gold cliff off from another and gold cliff off from olive hill. The scene impressed him in every sense; it appeared full of original beauty and brilliant in detail. Amid this grandeur, his attention often turned to the water that lapped at the borders of the scene. He saw the reflections of the hills and the cliffs undulate quietly on the fluid surface. The broken hilltops appeared smoother and rounder there, the fissures in the cliffs, thinner and softer. The perspective was a modest change, but the water clearly had worked the edges off the terrain in reflecting it. Strangely (and he felt very strange at times), the effect was not unlike when he found ants all over his father’s pocket watch in the family kitchen. Sugar had gotten on the watch’s outside cover, and the ants had run in from all sides, eager to taste of it. He had watched them nibble and crawl everywhere on the tightly closed cover. While they’d come for the sugar, he felt sure somehow they were eating away at the watch itself. Its gold had appeared as if it would last forever in his father’s hand, but those ants, lapping at the sweet cover, like the water by the cliffs, convinced him they could wear down the watch’s burnish, however fine it looked.
He kept thinking of the cliffside from the first days of looking on its splendor and meant to visit the scene whenever he could, even when he grew older. But life did not give him the opportunity: his family moved and he had to leave that country. The end of any chance to be amid the brilliant cliffside felt like a shadow falling over him. He did not want the memory of the place to be left behind him, however, and returned to the idea of the locale often in mind. The cliffs and hills were part of him, he would think, and he’d be grateful that living there had done much to form him as a person. He had grown, taken firmness in body, stepping amid the gold-toned terrain. He knew his eyes had gained brightness and quickness looking on the light that streamed along the clifftops. His perspective had expanded, studying the wide extent of the olive hills. All of these effects had imprinted him strongly, and he cherished the idea in his sense of dislocation from the place.
As he thought along this line, some strange incidents were occurring with his pocket watch. He had used it daily since getting it as a graduation present years ago from his father, but recently the watch had stopped. He put the timepiece out of the way on the mantle in his living room, not knowing what to do to fix it. He was never sure if it were the sun that fell on it in the afternoon that did the job, but the half of the timepiece on the mantle’s edge melted the longer it sat there; it got to where the watch hung down toward the floor, its hands bent in perpendicular planes that no longer lay flat. All this while, a fly had developed the habit of visiting the watch’s face. It went to tasting the glass on each visit, much like the ants that had crawled over his father’s timepiece. As the fly kept returning, its shadow morphed on the watch glass from that of an insect to a grown man standing in a wing-like cape. He couldn’t explain the event except to suppose that somehow the fly’s interest had caused the difference in his shadow. But even more remarkable than the fly was the blue tint the watch took. The color spread all over its face, the longer the watch lay on the mantle. Pocket watches do not turn blue, reflect flies as grown men, nor melt in the sun, he knew very well, which suggested that there was more at play here.
He came to figure that the timepiece was undergoing a metaphoric type of change and that it pointed to the extraordinary significance the watch held for him. He’d long cherished the watch, his father’s gift, his watch of daily use. He had considered its time at different instants as fast, accurate, slow. He had remarked the item as handsome, tarnished, or in need of repair. He had thought it less than noteworthy one moment, valuable another. These thoughts over the watch made it different from any other item for him; they gave the thing a personal bend and color, the metaphor that it seemed now to embody. The fly broadened the meaning of this metaphor. In the light of reflection, which the sun figured handsomely on the mantle, he realized the creature had an attachment to the watch that could be compared to his own. The fly and he were alike then, which made its human-like shadow on the glass fitting to see. These interesting thoughts on the fly and his own memories let him appreciate how the sense of consciousness may have rippled the timepiece’s hard, cold form and left it an magic blue.
A similar metamorphosis was working on him, he realized. He could admit, aged past youth, apart from his grand, native country, living under a shadow by the day, that he had changed. His body had lost its firm contours, its tone fading through his extremities. His dominant eye, great at seeing far and picking out detail, closed often now in tiredness, dozing, picturing cliffs he no longer visited. Long, soft eyelashes crossed his face and grew as he dreamed, replacing the hard fissure-like angles of his cheeks and jaw. Regret over a past to which he could not return thinned his bright, blonde hair. Age had softened him like paste if still he lived within the shell of his remembered experience, much like a fly in its exoskeleton.
Memory kept busy within him all this time he was changing. Like a tongue, it went lapping and licking his deepest interior, sampling and re-knowing the past. And in its wet pressing and searching, that tongue wore down the hard outline that his past seemed to hold and let him know its real essence. He could sense now that the experiences of his native country had an outsized effect on the rest of his life. He appreciated the changes wrought by time, recalling his father had given him a watch once and that it now had stopped as if forever. In this refined perception of the past, he seemed stripped bare and left only the truth, as a dead tree might cling still to an old leaf. This leaf, symbolizing for him the essence of his memories, he figured as the blue timepiece that metaphor had softened. He imagined himself as the tree that held this leaf, the watch’s precious form, on the long branch of his attention. This symbol for the heart of memory, the knowledge retained from experience, limp but beautiful, he trusted should be preserved. He knew it since the object had meaning whenever he thought of the watch’s blue, the special feelings and ideas it conveyed. From the color, he read out the value of his formative years that lay distant but preserved within him still. So, he held the watch, tinged with meaning that came from memory, in a high place within him.
He decided he would extend the metaphor the watch spoke of in its melted form and blue color. By the blue sea, he built a platform painted in blue, the color the pocket watch had taken due to his long attachment. In giving the structure this ethereal color, he hinted at the beauty that knowledge carried in its summary of experience while it was grounded in the concrete like the platform. He completed the structure, feeling he had shared, in a condensed, symbolic way, the special knowledge he had with the whole world. The blue platform still stands, not unlike a shorter, simpler version of the cliffside he had cherished in his native country.
Note: The story originally appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. The author has revised the text and the above is the latest version.
About the Author
Norbert Kovacs lives and writes in Hartford, Connecticut. He has published art-inspired fiction recently in Timada’s Diary, Ekphrastic, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. His website: www.norbertkovacs.net.
