Thinking about why it is that Heymish’s photographs create a kind of proprietary urge, a question arises – how can they be nostalgic for so many people, when memories are supposed to be our own? Somewhere between dream and memory, the images create acute but inarticulate feelings, that seem to belong intimately, and impossibly to one’s own personal history.
This passage on Proust by James Logenbach in The Resistance to Poetry is a wonderful accompaniment to Heymish’s photographs:
“In a crucial passage in Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust remembers seeing three trees at the entry to a covered driveway. Like the moment when he tastes the madeleine or feels the uneven paving stones beneath his feet, this moment instantly becomes overdetermined by associations he could never have predicted. Unlike those other moments, however, this glimpse of trees seems both powerfully meaningful and painfully obscure, and as Proust struggles to elucidate its claim on his attention, he explores the processes by which the madeleine or the paving stones come to feel so significant. The trees seem uncannily familiar; his mind wavers between past and present; the present loses its immediacy and shimmers with a sense of make-believe. Why? Had a similar vision lodged in his mind so long ago that he no longer remembered its origin? Or had he glimpsed the trees many years ago in a dream? One possibly generates another.
Or were they merely an image freshly extracted from a dream of the night before, but already so worn, so faded that it seemed to me to come from somewhere far distant?
And another:
Or had I indeed never seen them before, and did they conceal beneath their surface, like certain trees on tufts of grass that I had seen beside the Guermantes way, a meaning as obscure, as hard to grasp, as is a distant past, so that, whereas they were inviting me to probe a new thought, I imagined that I had to identify an old memory?
And another:
Or again, were they concealing no hidden thought, and was it simply visual fatigue that made me see them double in time as one sometimes sees double in space.
“I could not tell” says Proust, who is left without the sudden memory of Venice provoked by the the uneven paving stones or the childhood vistas conjured up by the taste of the madeleine.