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“I’m not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I’d turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
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This small painting that is hanging as part of the Little Gems exhibit at the West End Gallery (opening Friday, February 7) is titled Memoir.
The thought behind that title was that that while the future seems uncertain as we look forward, our pasts as we recall them are often just as uncertain.
Our personal histories are a patchwork, like the sky in this painting, of half memories and dimly lit stories. Faces and names fade. Words once spoken are lost in the void. We have grainy snips and snaps of what we recall as significant moments and some surprisingly sharp images of insignificant moments that puzzle us, leaving us to wonder why they remain so clear.
Do they mean something more and we just don’t see their true meaning?
I looked at this small piece and wondered what I would include in my memoir. What would I pull from that haphazard patchwork that I would want to share now and into the future?
After sifting through the shards of broken memories, I come to the conclusion that I don’t want to write a memoir. Let my memoir show itself in my work, let my story be told in paint and line and shapes, a crude group of hieroglyphs that will no doubt go untranslated in generations to come.
Let the future, if it is so inclined, write my past. That shall be memoir enough for me.
For this Sunday morning music, here’s a song to go along with this painting. It’s the Nick Lowe pop classic, When I Write the Book.
Have a good Sunday.
Your reflections brought to mind this passage from Balthazar, one of the books in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet:
“We live” writes Pursewarden somewhere, “lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”
Ah, he’s such a beautiful writer…
First of all, that painting is absolutely beautiful and it’s true what they said about a painting or a picture can say a million words or in this case memories. I completely agree in the comparison you made stating that if future is uncertain, past events are even more unclear, which is why memoir are pretty hard to write and live on through them.