but is April actually the cruelest month?

April ➡️➡️ memory/desire

Like most people, I didn’t read ‘The Waste Land’ until college. But like many people, I read it obsessively. Again and again and again. The result of that obsession is that, occasionally, lines from the poem still appear in my head and run themselves along — this happened just last week as I was pushing our stroller through the park. A wind was howling low across the bright grass and the sight of it under the blue bowl-of-sky brought those opening lines into my head. You know them, of course, they go like this:

April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The lines ran through my head for several minutes and they didn’t go away until I said them out loud; and when I said them out loud, I found myself examining them from a new perspective.¹ Here I was pushing a stroller on a sunny (if windy) April day — in a role that I’ve never played before (the new father) — when I came upon dusty memories mixing into the greenery of the present in that way they seem only to do in the spring.

Even after I had put the lines into the back of my mind, I couldn’t get away from that notion — that April has this unique ability to bring out your memories and mess around with you. This happens the first time you come upon something like an empty green field under the sun, speckled with yellow-orange dandelions and a line of trees on far edge.

The sort of memories I’m talking about are usually called involuntary memories.² They come at you without warning. And, though we’re only a few days into this month, it seems to me that April is full of these mind-landmines.³

Or maybe it’s unfair to categorize them as landmines; but there are certainly some problems with involuntary memories. The first problem being that you might have positive or negative associations with them (or, more likely, you have complex associations with them). The second problem being that you can’t predict when they’ll come on; and because you can’t predict them, you can’t avoid them.

But the nice thing about involuntary memories is that, if you’re relatively vigilant, they can sneak up on you only once. And after they hit you, you can classify and manage them. You can call on them if you want to or avoid them if you’d rather not see them again.

The memories associated with the field and the stroller and the dandelions are too vague to be properly analyzed and so here are two specific examples of involuntary memories that I came upon just recently — these are just from the month of April.

1. Last week, I was reading something on my phone and distractedly pushing a cart through the aisles of a supermarket when I heard the chorus to ‘Strawberry Wine’ over the speakers. Now, I wasn’t listening to the music before the chorus, I hadn’t even noticed that there was music. But the chorus hit me like a cold wind. Furthermore, I didn’t know that I had a memory tied to ‘Strawberry Wine’ but damn if it didn’t take me right back to a hot spring afternoon and a girl I used to date with a southern accent, standing on a picnic table and belting out like strawberry wine seventeen hot july moon seen everything.

2. Also last week, at the local liquor store, they were selling a twelve-pack of Rolling Rock for $5 and so I bought the beer and thought no more of it until that evening when I had one and, as soon as the beer hit my lips, I remembered a very specific moment. I remembered sitting in a hot tub at the edge of a yard and it was a cool but sunny spring day and in the back of my mind, I was worried about something. I don’t remember what it was that I was worried about. But I remember deciding I wouldn’t worry about it anymore, because it was a new spring and I was young and in a hot tub on a bright day with nothing to do except drink Rolling Rock. That’s what the taste brought back.

This is all to say that I’ve come upon another bittersweet benefit of growing older: collecting and cataloguing memories. And it’s a horrible cliche to say that I won’t listen to ‘Strawberry Wine’ anymore but oh well, here were are. There are plenty of other songs I don’t listen to anymore. I don’t listen to ‘The September of my Years’ by Frank Sinatra or ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’ by Death Cab for Cutie. I might someday but for now, if those songs come on, I turn them off.

But why again, why is April overrun with involuntary memories? What is it about the spring that mixes our memories with our desires? I can’t say, and I doubt anybody can.⁴ I guess it’s probably anecdotal evidence — widespread anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence none the less. And, after all, maybe it’s not such a terrible notion.⁵

Maybe, what I’m saying is that April isn’t the cruelest month after all. Maybe it’s not so bad to go back and remember all those things that happened in previous springs. If anything, it’s nice to know where they are, where the memory landmines are in your head. And you can’t do anything about them being there. Just like T.S. Eliot couldn’t do anything about the wasteland of the world after the first world war. All you can do is push your shopping cart or stroller through the bright spring afternoons and try not to let your memories — or desires — get the better of you.

1. The Waste Land is one of those pieces of literature that you can read over and over again and they occasionally change as you come to them. That poem usually means something about the rebellion and promise of youth when you read it in college. But of course you turn thirty-something and the poem becomes about the emptiness of promises that are fundamentally unobtainable. Ulysses is like that too. And so is Fear and Trembling and I suspect War and Peace is like that too but I only first read it a few years ago so I haven’t been able to see it change.

2. I don’t know if a line of hundred-year-old poetry would classify as a ‘memory’ but, for the sake of this article, I’m going to say it does. Because again, really good books or poems or paintings can just happen to you. They form an experience just like anything else. You might remember a wine-soaked party on a sprawling hillside but then you study it a bit closer and realize no, that was just a scene from the end of The Dharma Bums.

3. apparently some people refer to involuntary memories as mind pops, which is definitely something I can get behind. I’ve usually called them madeline memories, because like, most book junkies, I associate them with Proust and his madeline scene. And that whole book makes me think of spring.

4. also, nobody is ever going to get money to study this. I mean, how do you write a grant proposal for “I want to figure out if humans are more involuntarily reminiscent during the spring.”

5. I also wonder if these memories — the things that pop into your head more frequently in the spring — ever even happened originally in the spring. Or is it a situation where we’re just more receptive to those memories in the spring and so our head naturally transforms them? That happens all the time, you think you remember something happening in April but then you ask your friend who was with you at the time about it and they say no. No, actually that happened in October. You’re misremembering it.