Flashing Memories
It’s been a while since I got onto this site or added
anything to it, but some reading, and a few days of relative semi-shut-in while
we recover from a surprise visit from COVID, turned into opportunity. I have
been revisiting some books that had me going a few years ago, and they still
have that effect, it seems.
Pema Chödrön, in Welcoming the Unwelcome, writes of a
practice she calls “stepping into the flow of impermanence”: “The practice is
very simple. Recollect an event or a moment from yesterday or earlier today.
Contemplate how it is gone forever, like a past lifetime” (109). Well, yesterday, I was browsing back through
Patti Smith’s The Year of the Monkey. She has been sifting through boxes
of old Polaroids, looking for a shot of the games of Roberto Bolaño, stacked in
his closet. She finds it. Not much of a shot, really.
But it got me thinking of the other day, scrolling through
the photos in our smartphones of our trips to Nice, Paris, etc. One is a shot,
of me at a table on Cours Saleya, at midnight, my “Leonardo” pen in hand, up
against my jaw, paused while writing in my trip journal. Behind me, a lot of
younger – much younger – couples out for an evening. We (Ewa and I) had just
enjoyed late-night sangrias (Ewa’s idea. She had read about some characters in
a novel sipping them, and wondered, so we had some. Surprisingly good on a hot
night on the Riviera).
That image of me took a tiny fraction of a second to create as a memento, but that
moment was already gone (had arguably never truly existed except as created as
a gathering of pixels in a phone Ewa no longer even owns) by the time it was
taken, before she showed it to me, before she shared it with me, before I
considered it as a possible portrait for my own phone or for Facebook. Long
before yesterday morning when Patti Smith’s tale of her search brought it to
mind.
My phone is full of such photos of me “being a writer” – and, I suppose, full of missed because
unrecorded ghost moments when I was doing much the same thing without Ewa or
anyone else there to take (make) the picture. Moments like the time last
September outside Les Distilleries on Rue Benoit Bunico, having a Grimbergen
Double Ambre and writing a poem about the passing scene as a moment in the
history of such passing scenes at that corner.
I read that poem at the Edmonton Stroll of Poets a few weeks
later. Right after a smooth-voiced young French woman had rad several of her
own poems, a delicious, soft, flowing delivery. Then I got up and read my
piece, with its bits of “tourist francais.” Sigh. But she smiled graciously, as
did a friend, Pierette, who is Franco-Albertan.
So – where was I? Oh, yes, the photos in my phone. Dozens of
them. All created by other phones and their cameras. It’s odd to recall such
moments just because they were created digitally in passing. Not that flash of
part of a second earlier or later in that ongoing incidental occasion. We had
that marvellously relaxing evening on Cours Saleya, but have never (yet) gone
back to that table at that time for another sangria. Not yet, anyway.
The T-shirt I am wearing in that photo was a new one,
bought, as I recall, the day before, or possible earlier that same day.
Definitely on that trip. I still have it, still in my T-shirt drawer, much
faded, and currently too large because of the 15+ kilos I have lost since
February.
What I really wante4d to say – my phone and many albums of
printed photos are full of such created “memorable moments.” Moments in no way
more or less memorable than the instants just before or after, though digitally
or chemically memorialized. We “make” memories in the random instant. We recall
them through random browsing or deliberate searches, for particular or
not-too-particular reasons. Such makings are sometimes “official” records of
life’s ceremonial moments. Weddings, births children, bits of honeymoon or
anniversary trips. Some might even be of places or events we did not truly
enjoy, but that as recorded don’t look so bad, looking back.
Then there’s the portrait of me at 32 or 33 (as nearly as I
can recall. My “Sherlock Holmes” pose (though I have an Irish hat, not a
deerstalker; a briar, not a meerschaum). It was one of a bunch of studies my
first wife and I took of each other, learning some tricks of lighting and
exposure in our SLR days. I was never that guy, except for that pose for 1/60
or 1/125 of a second.
So – a trick of the light, and a trip of the shutter, and
there a non-version of me looks out at another passing version of me, wondering
when that version “was,” even if only for a flash. I no longer have that hat or
that pipe, or even the sweater I am wearing. That moment has passed, piece by
piece, from any chance of being reposed and re-memorialized, even supposing I
should ever have wanted to. The negatives? Long-since lost or misfiled. The
other shots taken on that occasion? Most never printed except on a contact
sheet, I suppose. Passed like the pages in the journal I wrote that night in
Nice, or the notes in the notebook I splashed out the original draft of this
piece in will or might become, soon enough. Or like the digital record in the
phones or in this blog might, one day, in a power or magnetic surge or some
other such act of erasure.
