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What is a memory? This seems like such an abstract question to me. I ́d rather start by asking, what do I remember?
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I remember a wasteland, a still life, a crocodile that lived in the hallways of a hotel. I remember carnivals dedicated to flayed saints, girls with braids by the coast…
I’ve been keeping journals that try to record a distant past. I’ve been trying to capture how the past appears within conscience, how it's produced in the present moment.
And sometimes things are blurry. Sometimes paths lead to dead ends. Some important elements are occasionally missing, lost to oblivion. And sometimes memories are too full, decorated by too many elements and sensations to be able to keep track of everything.
Building this past relies on a series of decisions: I choose the words that best describe an experience or a sensation, I choose information to be recorded and information to be dismissed, I choose the beginning and end of an idea.
I try to choose my words carefully because I realize that my past is being rewritten.
The structure of the sentence, the paragraphs, the vocabulary, the way the narrative is assembled and its structure changes my past forever.
I realize now that I ́m not writing a memory. I ́m actually remembering through writing.
Memory maybe can be understood not only as a mental process but as an action through which an impression of past is materialized, through which remembering and forgetting are embodied.
I ́m forced to select relevant information, to dismiss the elements which I don't consider important: a background character, a topic in a conversation that did not lead anywhere, the prelude to an irrelevant action, so many things that today I choose to forget.
Characters come and go, threads lead nowhere, different days are conflated into a single moment, it really doesn't matter much. What matters now is the action: I´m forced to narrate. And in turn it feels to me as if I'm forced to live my life as narration.
Was it Ricoeur that said that time only becomes human insomuch as it is narrated?
And how do I choose what I want to tell? Where does a memory begin and where does a memory end?
