ultimate reality

Swooping around on Google the other day, noticing and occasionally alighting on something of interest, I somehow came to a title,
"George McGovern, the Quiet Warrior:  Photos from his '72 Campaign"
on a LIFE magazine site --
Took a look -- Aah, 22 photographs to "arrow" through.
First one was the 1972 Dem. candidate-for-president's face;
arrow to second photo -- and there's the candidate on an airplane, & another man seated across the aisle, leaning forward to tell Sen. McGovern something...and it's -- the other guy -- is...
Somebody I Know...!

I was, "Whoa!"

Caption reads,
"George McGovern (right) and adviser during the 1972 presidential campaign."

Well, the "adviser" has a name -- and I KNOW IT!

Well -- so?
Well -- nothing...I don't know....it was just surprising and fun, that's all.

I had to click back onto the site, and the photo, a couple of times -- "Yes.  Ye-e-es...that's him."

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The "adviser" was a lobbyist at the state capitol during the 90s, when I lobbied, so would see him daily "at work" for two months out of the year, when the legislature met.  (I "knew" him the way you know someone at work...talked a few times, had lunch in proximity in capitol cafeteria...)  He would see me in the hallway on third floor and say, "Hi, kid!" at the beginning of a legislative session.

One year at the beginning of the session, he greeted me with a hug.
(Think he was greeting everyone with hugs, that year -- [temporarily setting aside traditional "WASP" barriers -- if Jewish people had been observing us, they probably would have said, "Oy, these people need to take a course in Hugs 101 - !"]  ...)
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It's just so unexpected to look at a picture from 40 years ago and see a politician you've shaken hands with three times in your life, who you were expecting to see, along with a person you knew 20 years after the picture was taken, whom you were not expecting to see, in this picture, taken 20 years before you ever knew the other person in the picture -- so you didn't know him when the picture was taken, but looking at the picture now, you know that's him, and you knew him later but you still know him now to look at him back then...ok, this is becoming Not A Sentence....

Different memories / experiences from various different times in one's own life, drifting in
media ~~ internet ~~ memory
space, and then surfacing -- together or in new combinations...

it made me think of Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust (which have not read) -- it's something about memory...
------------ Wiki Free Encyclopedia:  ...Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence:  to live means to perceive different and often conflicting aspects of reality...
Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel....
Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator's learning the use of "signs" to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist....

...the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds.  Art triumphs over the destructive power of time....----------------- [end excerpt, Free Encyc.]

(I don't know what I'm talking about....)

-30-