absence / presence

Do you ever wonder where lost memories go?

I can't believe it's almost seven years since I first started writing memoir / personal essays.

Some thoughts over the years:

I liken Spiegelman to an optometrist, slipping discs of carefully cut glass before one’s eyes, bringing the past into focus. “The past [however] was not a fixed place one could visit. It was not static. It was a voyage, constant motion.” In an interview with Signature, she reflects that writing is a recorded past but this does not make it “more true … it’s still a subjective perception of reality”. All memoir is subjective; few admit this so explicitly. (2016)

Memoir is cold milk hitting hot tea—pale tendrils, little eddies twisting, tangling—past melting into present. (2018)

I thought my diaries would pave the way to truth. In relying on them, however, I didn’t allow myself to remember. A diary, in its singular plane, is not a narrative. Memoir, in any case, is séance rather than resurrection. (2019)

A sculptor works with stone. A painter, oils. A photographer, light. A writer, time.

My recent reading list has included: In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale), A Handbook For My Lover by Rosalyn D'Mello, Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (trans. Tanya Leslie), The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (trans. Stephen Snyder).

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I thought 'Shades of Longing' was almost complete. I thought I just had to strengthen the links and it would be done. Since September, I've tinkered and added comments for an editor but I've not looked at it with an eye to edit. Last night, I ruthlessly cut half the draft.

I like that it's pieced together from fragments—an essay on ACMI's Wong Kar Wai retrospective, a 2014 blog post, an entry for Stay Home Diary, snippets from a "failed" essay—but it needs work. Perhaps the two essays I'm working on (longing/absence and smudged lipstick/presence) are actually one, and the one essay should be developed into several?