My complete childhood is distilled into a couple of photograph albums, with the highlights, whether of achievement or embarrassment, captured in no more than a dozen talismanic stills, now faded and curling at the edges. Yet our own children go on one school trip and return with a hundred images stashed on a memory card: will that enhance or dilute their later remembrance of themselves?
If If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats and this article on the Leica M8 in the New Yorker are, respectively, film’s wake and eulogy, this article (and the paper it references, Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing) are why we should be mourning.
In Downey, I browsed some old prints my mother left on the pullout of the McDowell-Craig in their custody, each no more than six inches on the larger edge, each set no more than 30 deep. Most of the pictures are from the Manila days, earlier than I can recall, and it occurred to me that someday I will be the custodian of these pictures of myself once the people who remember the events they depict have passed. And then, they will default to portraiture, and their only relevant context will be the names and lifespans and heirs of their subjects.
Okay, maybe no heirs.
But to answer, or rather, address the question of one’s later remembrance of themselves, I’m considering what I really lose when I forget something—one of your birthdays or phone numbers or license plates or favorite movies or food allergies. When or if I lose the person with whom these memories are associated—and not necessarily to death, but these days, to distance and the passage of time—what is worth preserving about their place in my past? In those relationships, what I learned and where I derived joy, surely. And since none of these repeated sequences hold more than an incidental place in those relationships, why does the modern interpretation of memory favor their preservation?
Memory should be more than memorization, more than the rote and the verbatim and the relentless production of dendrites. And the first step of changing how one remembers, the first step of changing anything, is forgetting.
Related, via Coudal: Photos of the Taliban, from a time when photography was illegal in Afghanistan. The slideshow interface doesn’t allow one to simply flick through, but the context the audio provides is indispensable. And via kottke: Richard Watson’s extinction timeline.
Clearly, I have an urgent need to reread “Funes the Memorious.”
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