“Memory is shaped by forgetting just as the shore is shaped by the sea”
Marc Augé
How do you perform your memories? Do you wear them on your sleeves? Can I read your memories in the same way that I read your personality? The way you wear your hair or where you choose to place your tattoos? Is it on your All Stars, or in the way you sashay?
Our memories flow from everything we do and say. Take for example the time I learned how to walk. I was 11 years old and in middle school when a couple of boys slapped the books out of my hand, knocked me over, and told me I walked like a girl. I thought that maybe if I learned how to walk like a boy I might not have such a hard time and so began my 6th grade reconnaissance mission: operation “walk like a man.” I found nooks and crevices around campus to hide in while others walked to class or the cafeteria. I waited and took notes. Copious notes. When I got home I snuck out to the alley ways around our house and practiced, sometimes for hours, until the new walk finally took. It was shaky at first, like when you learn to dance for the first time. The more I did it, though, the better I got until one day it just became the way I walk. Now I still got picked on for having a funny name and carrying my books in a weird way and saying the shit that no one else would say, but no one ever critiqued the way I walked again.
Consciously and sub-consciously we are constantly adjusting the way our bodies do things. I like to think of it in terms of etching. When an artist etches she uses a strong acid to cut into a metal surface, creating an image that was not there before. It’s not, as Michaelangelo said, cutting away the outside to reveal the form waiting on the inside. Rather, this type of memory work involves a foreign substance (go ahead, call it culture), burning away past memories, those precious bits of ephemera that make up who we are, and replaces them with something Thomas Kincaid would be proud of. You know, if that man actually had any pride. Of course we could always pick up the acid ourselves and burn away as we see fit. They are our bodies, after all.
Photo Credit: Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky
