Thursday, July 13, 2006

"Memory Hoarder"
1:28am

I have finished it, my looking back over the past year, for my Book of Life project. This drawing I did earlier this evening captures how I feel:


I am indeed a 'memory hoarder'

As I went through the past year's worth of entries, this excerpt speaks to me:

September 11, 2005
"
(excerpts) "Memory"

I live in the present, but it is all the memories of my past which are there in the subtle background of my consciousness. All that I have experienced is held in the hand of memory, the happy, the difficult, the triumphant, it is there. As I remember the past, I also embrace the present being more aware of the growth that has occurred. Without those memories, I have no measuring stick by which to measure this.

There's a Chinese proverb which declares "The best memory is not as good as pale ink." That was penned by a writer or artist who 'froze time' so that a previous moment could be perserved as it was. It's been nearly nine years of chronciling my life. Nearly nine years of savored bits. I celebrate each one. It is the mind of the writer which collects these bits. I do not live for 'the record'. But this record serves as a scrapbook of hoarded moments. The words and images cue my memory. It all comes back to memory.

This Spanish filmmaker said it so well:

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."
Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), My Last Sigh, ch. 1 (1983)

And so I savor these hoarded memory-aids, this record of my path.

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