Remembrance
A poem : Part 1
1. Making Sense of it Our memories are the things that we guard with the fiercest of passion. They are the pieces of our existence which cannot be destroyed, swindled away or stolen. Memories are not from what we are made, they are what save us. Many cannot be recalled - still there, immutable, seemingly irretrievable. They say we’ve just lost ‘the key’ but that’s wrong - we just don’t give ourselves enough time to sit still and recall, dust off our remembrance, get them back into the open. I recalled being shown strange photographs, slithers, lined up, it was startling understanding how to move through time in them. The image was someone's actual memory and I realised how, perhaps, they could use this concept in a different way, a reality. Can you for a minute stop thinking of time in such a linear way, and if you can then the possibility of going back, reliving or even changing your memories becomes a reality. What would you do? What do you want to change - what difference do you yearn for? You need to put the work in. See things in this new way. Effort is the rarest of actions known to mankind right now, an exertion of physical or mental power lost and for most of us we just cannot be arsed. Which makes it keener, perhaps for those who do. You want to know the trick? You want me to tell you how to do this, but really, there is none - either do or don’t. Perhaps wake up one unseasonably wet spring morning from a sleepless night of troubles, youth long lost, with nothing to look forward to. Capitulate.
Alexandra Road Estate, Kilburn. London. 2017. Holga 120GFN
I keep reading the last few lines over and over. How do I wake from sleepless nights is less of a problem when you look at the last word of this piece. It's philosophical and dark. A bit of reverse psychology. I won't capitulate. I will keep going. Wow!
Thank you Richard. Your photos are very amusing sometimes: they tickle me and they make me consider things, and you're very gifted at "serialising" them. Green things and rubbish bins.
But this is different. It's these pieces that impel me to subscribe to your work, and I thank you very much for this.
I wrote a contrasting piece about memories and pictures, and may have referred it to you before, but here it is again: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/superstition-and-photography. It mentions the purge in Iran ten years after the revolution, in which opponents and critics were not simply abducted and killed, but their images were also eradicated from photos.
They say we edit our memories, blotting out the bad ones and enhancing the good ones. I wonder in how far that's true and whether anyone could even prove it scientifically. My own feeling is that we remember things exactly as they were; what we change is how we now feel about what we remember.