Gaps are what makes memory so much more valuable for it is in loss that we realise the real beauty of what was once held - a memory. Reminds me of one of my favourite writer Milan Kundera's trilogy - Slowness, Identity & Ignorance. "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting" : )
Bravo, V! Love your writing, the clarity, the unspooling of complex thinks given shape.
I am myself a few ppl’s memory-keeper, I have an excellent memory for my early childhood and adolescence and twenties… then parenthood brings the doldrums of drudge routine. So many lovely and specific moments just melted away unremembered unless we captured them with video or wrote them down immediately, I’m sure all parents can relate.
In more recent years I’ve been beset by migraines, which have gotten more and more ferocious. I have become someone who for months at a time in winter seems to have dementia — I repeat myself, forget whole conversations, forget full events I’ve participated in. Those gaps often don’t fill in when ppl remind me of what I’ve forgotten. Other people and my own handwriting and multiple phone alarms have become my outsourced working memory. The gaps in our own lives, things we lived authentically in the moment but cannot remember (as opposed to gaps from inebriation or sleeping) — like the calls of consolation after your father died — for me bring up ponderings about the nature of reality, the machinations of time, are our souls on autopilot if the memory scribe does not take not notes? If other ppl experience us as ourselves but we do not remember, were we there?
Etc and so on.
Very glad to see Lynda Barry paying dividends into your life! And a sneak peek into your wip — marvellous. 💛
Gaps are what makes memory so much more valuable for it is in loss that we realise the real beauty of what was once held - a memory. Reminds me of one of my favourite writer Milan Kundera's trilogy - Slowness, Identity & Ignorance. "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting" : )
Thanks for a sharing Tejas. Will visit the trilogy !
Bravo, V! Love your writing, the clarity, the unspooling of complex thinks given shape.
I am myself a few ppl’s memory-keeper, I have an excellent memory for my early childhood and adolescence and twenties… then parenthood brings the doldrums of drudge routine. So many lovely and specific moments just melted away unremembered unless we captured them with video or wrote them down immediately, I’m sure all parents can relate.
In more recent years I’ve been beset by migraines, which have gotten more and more ferocious. I have become someone who for months at a time in winter seems to have dementia — I repeat myself, forget whole conversations, forget full events I’ve participated in. Those gaps often don’t fill in when ppl remind me of what I’ve forgotten. Other people and my own handwriting and multiple phone alarms have become my outsourced working memory. The gaps in our own lives, things we lived authentically in the moment but cannot remember (as opposed to gaps from inebriation or sleeping) — like the calls of consolation after your father died — for me bring up ponderings about the nature of reality, the machinations of time, are our souls on autopilot if the memory scribe does not take not notes? If other ppl experience us as ourselves but we do not remember, were we there?
Etc and so on.
Very glad to see Lynda Barry paying dividends into your life! And a sneak peek into your wip — marvellous. 💛