The persistence of memory (inconsistency, subsistence)
This line often floats into my head with a sense of profundity. I know it’s the name of a Dali painting- the famous one with the melting clocks. People wrote that it referred to Einsteins theory of special relativity. When asked, Dali said it was inspired by melted Camembert.
I think I’m more in the Camembert camp- i find it easier to access and understand than space and time. That was something I found a bit exhausting about art college- on our first day in the sculpture department we were told that sculpture is about ‘space, place and time’, which was all very hefty. Would it have lent more weight to my work if the plaque on the wall referenced Einstein, rather than being upfront about the fact that I was tripping balls and eating cheese? (This is purely hypothetical).
Speaking of cheese, when we were in France and eating pastries, Molly asked me what the nicest cake I ever had was. I couldn’t just remember the nicest- I could barely remember any of the cakes I’ve eaten. Later, we went into a museum and looked at some paintings. I tried to remember feeling excited about paintings and remembered when I was a teenager and had seen a Dali for the first time. I can’t remember where that was though. And when I thought harder, I wasn’t sure if it was even my memory or the memory of a friend I had at the time. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the painting.
I’ve gone off on tangents before reading about the inconsistency of memory- stories of false witness testimonies and memory experiments. Asides from the practical implications it has in terms of the judicial system, I think there is a certain fascination with the subject that feeds into the cult of the individual- latching onto our memories as an integral part of our identities. I’ll quote Mishima in Kinkaku-Ji second-hand (because I first came across him in a Sylvain Tesson book) - ‘...What gives meaning to our life’s actions is fidelity to a certain moment, and our effort to make that moment last forever...’.
This resonated with me in the sense that I think a lot of the choices I make and the things I care about are silently governed by a sense of nostalgia- things that influenced me in my formative years. The Pinterests I save, the aesthetic choices I make. Some of these choices and interests can be clearly traced back- my most enduring interests have been those I’ve had since I was a child- like anime, art and nature. But this theory is complicated when you consider the fluidity of memory. Some of the ‘moments’ I’m attempting to replicate might not be my own moments at all but something I saw in a film, or something I told myself so many times that it coalesced into something more concrete. With the influence of media and the fact we’re exposed to so much information in a day, it could be considered a tragedy that increasingly, our memories are not our own. Additionally, we outsource our memories- into digital photo albums and archives, and Google means we don’t need to be able to recall specific facts and information. This circumvents the need to process memories, to integrate them into our schema. They become less a part of our inner world and more of a marketable identity- a series of experiences and sensations that can be encapsulated into a pretty photograph. Maybe I’m being cynical here but I’ve felt myself in the last few years, that I am experiencing the world in a more superficial way and I think this comes from the fact that I am bombarded with so much information every day and have less and less time to process it. People advocate for a mindfulness approach in allowing us to be more present, but I think an essential component we’re neglecting is also time to parse this information.
I try to allay any anxieties I have about this state of affairs with embracing the idea of the ‘hive mind’. I’m coming at this from a relatively uninformed angle- I haven’t read a whole lot about collective thought and how it might be integrated into the digital Information Age. Putting aside for a moment the unsavoury inequity inevitably wrought by capitalism, we can see social media and shared memories as a modern iteration of the fact that humans are ultimately social creatures. Social media is and can be a wellspring of creativity and, at the risk of sounding way too grandiose, acts as a placeholder for religion in secular society- that is the sense of connectedness and being part of something bigger. AI provides the potential to generate entirely new material from our collective efforts and creations (again, if you can put aside the economic implications this has for artists). All our individual thoughts and experiences are delineated into a scrollable consumable, which, via our engagement, feeds into algorithms which aid the creation of further content and clickables, a digital Ouroboros (again, with the grandiosity).
But now, away from the Borg and back to my own individual experience (because that’s why I’m keeping this blog?). A few years ago, I worked for a while on a vineyard in New Zealand. Initially I was working on the harvest- it was fairly monotonous, physical labour, but I enjoyed it. I think I once read in a museum some historic piece of anti-Irish propaganda- efforts to Google it yielded nothing, only some funny and kind of pertinent results- I’ll share them here. Anyway, this piece was of course written from a colonialist perspective and painted the Irish as dull-witted and suited to monotonous, laborious tasks. It crossed my mind in my enjoyment of the harvest work, that maybe there was substance to that theory. In general, I was living at the time in a way that might be more similar to agrarian communities from long ago- we went to sleep every night when the sun went down, rose when it came up and because there was no phone reception our access to technology was very limited. It was a social job and the harvest workers spent a lot of time chatting amongst ourselves but equally there were periods of silence while we worked. It was in these silent periods that I became aware of the fact that my thoughts were operating differently and I found myself often accessing my memories as a means of entertainment. I was recalling specific memories and information I’d forgotten I even had- like I suddenly remembered how to count to 10 in Slovene. These memories didn’t just exist as objective facts or stories or pictures in my mind- they brought with them feelings and sensations which coloured and enhanced my present experience of the world. I remember thinking about Wordsworth, and how when he found himself ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’, he remembered his daffodils and I realised what a source of consolation memories could be. I felt, I think for the first time, an appreciation of a sentiment often espoused by older people, that no matter what happens or who comes or goes in your life, you will always have your memories and now I’m kind of afraid that this is increasingly not the case.
