Rest Stop – At the West End Gallery
Emorries
n. vivid memories of a certain experience that you carry in your head for years until they’re casually disputed by someone who remembers it very differently—correcting basic chronology, clarifying a misread gesture, or adding context you never knew—which makes you want to look again at all the images you’ve been using to piece together your worldview, wondering what details might’ve been hidden in shadow all this time, or washed out by your own naïveté.
After documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose work often addresses the fallibility of memory and how little of reality can be captured in a photograph. Pronounced “em-uh-reez,” like memories, but with a piece missing.
— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig
I am well aware of the fallibility of memory, both my own and of other people in general. Being married so long, I am regularly confronted with recollections of things that have happened in the past– both distantly and recently– that differ wildly from my own memories of the same event. Sometimes one of us has memories that are absolutely absent from the memory of the other. As though only one of us was there.
Most of the time you just shrug it off as the events in question are usually not significant or earth-shattering in any way. They just take up valuable memory space that could better be utilized in holding on to more important things, like the name of some obscure band and the title of their obscure song from 70 years ago that you weren’t even fond of in the first place.
But sometimes, these gaps or misremembrances– these emorries— worry you a bit, especially if it concerns something that held importance to you, something that felt absolutely confident in your memories of it.
As an aging person, you immediately wonder if this is the beginning of some form of dementia. You’ve seen it in people you knew including some you loved so it seems natural to wonder. But you weigh out the facts and examine your other facilities and mannerisms and decide, or at least hope, that there’s nothing to worry about on this account. Unless, of course, you’re already well into dementia which means your observations on the subject are somewhat compromised.
But even if you can shrug that worry off and can be assured that you’re not yet in the throes of dementia, the fact remains that these emorries have somewhat shaken the foundation of the structure of yourself you have slowly built throughout your life. You begin to worry that that these once-trusted building blocks of memory were instead misremembrances, misinterpretations, falsehoods, or outright fabrications of your mind.
This makes you question if you are who and what you think you are and how you believe other people view you. Have you been living in a weird bubble of emorries all this time that is nothing like the reality of it all?
It makes one’s head spin. But then you realize that we’re all subject to the same condition, that everyone you encounter existence is built on their own set of emorries. They most likely are all contending with the same set of worries. You then realize all we know, our reality as it were, is just a large bubble of emorries, that nobody has total clarity of what is and isn’t.
That moment of realization may well ease your worries or may make your head spin even a little faster. That’s just the way it is. Or just how I am seeing it this morning.
By tomorrow, it will all be just another one of many distant or forgotten emorries.
Here’s a song from an artist that I have never shared here before, for some unknown reason. Maybe he simply slipped from my emorries. Jim Croce died in an airplane crash in 1973 at age 30 when he was at the peak of his success. He left behind a strong legacy in his songwriting and music that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. This is his Photographs & Memories. Very soothing stuff…
Redtree Times 