old selves
I'm making my way back to writing projects that I'd abandoned. Returning to them, the pages and pages of notes, printed, hand-written, with post-it notes and strike-throughs. All the evidence of having engaged with and invested in sentences that now seem unfamiliar and stubbornly obstructive. But there's no other way, really, except to give them their time. To consider what it was I was saying then, in language and in gesture. And what of those old utterances (that old self?) if any, still feel alive.
Not long ago, I was reminded of an occasion that I hadn't thought of in some time. I remembered a photo, and a note I had taken, an associated image and I went to look for it, in the boxes of notebooks I keep tucked away, beneath desks and in closets, and stacked in corners — out of the way, but close enough to access in a moment just like this. I found what I was looking for quickly, in a box of folders loosely organized by year and there was a certain satisfaction to being able to locate — in all this mess — a particular scrap of softened paper that brought me back sharply to the sensations of another time.
Moyra Davey, writing on photography:
Periodically, but infrequently enough to be surprised by what I find, I go through boxes of photographs and contact sheets made as long as twenty-eight years ago. My latest foray into the archive was sparked by a need to find specific negatives for a piece that never went beyond the contact sheet stage. In my memory the negs were 35 mm color. When I finally uncovered them, they were medium format, black and white, and fewer than I imagined.
….
Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won't surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.
This last bit is not unlike what Joan Didion says in her oft-quoted, "On Keeping a Notebook:"
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
I find myself agreeing, yes, to rediscover those past selves, to remember them, to attend to them, but for what reason, even with Didion's clear-sighted rationale, I am less certain. I suppose it is something about what we are able to know of ourselves, the possibility for more nuanced recognition of the self. My therapist's infuriatingly simple question: "If it's something you are able to name and think about, why not think about it?"
Why not, indeed.
Fluttering out from the same notebook I located the aforementioned scrap, this page:
10/20/14
flying to Baltimore (how many miles above?)
thin wispy veil of white laid over the ground
veins of highway
bad w/ geography so hardly ever know what I am looking at
what bodies of water or highways
what outline of a stadium or landmark
winding roadways, dense shape of cars
paying attention through the window
like a tilt shift filter, gently blurring the scene
to pay attention is to love
to love everything
