Forgotten dreams

Forgotten dreams is the phrase a researcher used for the ancient ochre paintings on the rock escarpments beside Lake Superior. In the novel, it turns a dangerous encounter with the paintings into a lasting idea: images can survive exposure to time and weather, even as the lives and hopes they evoke remain difficult to recover.

The Phrase and the Paintings

Jake Von Riesen brings his family to see the paintings, which have endured the elements of sun, water, and time. Reaching them means inching across slippery granite above deep, foaming water, holding a rope secured to the rock, and leaning out over the lake. Jake decides not to make the hazardous approach himself and reads the trail plaque instead. Its account of the researcher’s name for the paintings gives him a detail he considers worth recording in a small notebook.

The phrase is therefore encountered indirectly: the family cannot see the images from where they stand, while Elfrieda Von Riesen ventures along the rope and describes the strange, spiny creatures and cryptic symbols she can see. The paintings belong to a prolific nation, but the family receives them through partial access, a plaque, and Elfrieda’s account. That distance makes the name resonate with both preservation and loss: the images remain visible, while their full meanings are not disclosed in the scene.

Elfrieda’s Response

The paintings’ endurance and uncertain meaning stay with Elfrieda. In the new house, she begins working to increase her own visibility, inspired by what she sees in the rock images: their impermeability and their mixture of hope, reverence, defiance, and aloneness. She devises a mark from the initials of her name, E.V.R., and A.M.P., with an S crossing and enclosing the other letters; the initials and letters form All My Puny Sorrows.

The connection is not that Elfrieda simply copies the ancient images. Rather, she takes their capacity to persist as a model for making a sign of her own. The researcher’s phrase thus links an encounter with images called forgotten to Elfrieda’s deliberate attempt to be seen: what endures on the rock becomes an impetus for a new mark.