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.