Over the past week I have been asking myself what memory is. It seems like a logical starting point for this project - if I am to examine how quilters have used their craft towards commemoration (and, at the same, to make my own artifact), I will need to have a working definition of what it means to remember. It is a difficult question. The process of remembering is so changeable, so dependent on circumstances and context, that it seems impossible to generalize. Memories can surface from a particular scent; a quality of light; a specific site (or a place that is a reminder of somewhere else); a photograph or sound recording; language or speech; an emotion, or a physical feeling - there are an innumerable number of causes. But memories often seem random as well, unrelated to physical or psychological conditions.
In the exploration of this question, other related questions have come about:
Why are some events, figures, and feelings remembered while others are lost?
What marks something as worthy of remembrance (i.e. what distinguishes one moment from another)?
These questions are not new - I have constantly asked myself them in the past, and continue to do so. But, like memory itself, my answers are also changeable. What applies to one memory doesn't necessarily relate to the next.
This week, I consulted two sources: Sans Soleil, a 1983 film by Chris Marker, and The Mechanism of Mind by Edward de Bono. Sans Soleil is the film that first sparked my interest in the nature of memory, so I went back to it to look (or listen) for relevant information. This is what I found:
I'll have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.
Since my work constantly questions the process of remembering and examines forgetfulness or a loss of memory, I was interested in this quote from the mechanism of mind:
A memory does not have to be particularly informative about what has caused it. The interpretation, or readback, of the memory may be difficult, misleading or even impossible. (39)
These two quotes form the basis for what I hope to achieve conceptually with the quilt that I make. I am most interested in the 'holes,' the places where there is no such thing as an accurate memory and one is forced to use one's imagination to fill in the gaps.
Sources:
The Mechanism of Mind
Edward de Bono
Simon and Schuster: New York, 1969
p. 38-56
Sans Soleil (film)
Chris Marker
1983
