Now if memory jogging counted as exercise, I’d be well away…Currently trying to house several years’ worth of photos. There’s a certain amount of memory jogging taking place, as I try to remember what order things happened in, which year we visited whom, and so on.
Inevitably, you get drawn into the subject matter even as you file them away in albums. Looking at ones from our two trips to the States, in 2002 and 2003, it’s easy to step back into that world a little. Buildings, people, views, cafes, that kind of thing. When the kettle boils, or the letter box goes, it’s odd popping back into the ‘real world’.
I certainly couldn’t have related to you what was in the photos until I looked at them again. Some would see that as a reason to junk them – in the way that if you’ve not worn something for six months, it should go out. (As global warming increases, and the seasons feel fairly similar in Scotland, I guess the argument holds even more. It’s not like you’re keeping it for ‘the summer’, after all.)
But there again, some would say they are there all the time anyway. It’s estimated that we do actually retain large amounts of what we see, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. The regular comments of those who face near-death experiences is that images do seem to flash in front of your eyes – your life speeded up, a self-loading picture gallery, a lifetime’s worth of photo albums.
Oliver Sachs, in his book “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat“, goes further – after some brain malfunctions, it can be as though we relive earlier episodes in real time. One of his chapters deals with someone who, as her illness increases, spends longer and longer in earlier, and happier, parts of her childhood. When she dies, the nurses suggest that she has finally “gone home”, to the country she grew up in.
Enticing though it would be to spend time on the same holidays again (and what a money saver eh? two for the price of one!), it’s also good to be reminded of time edging on in the present day. Who knows – maybe prices would have gone up since you were away? Maybe you would now question the relevance of the particular day trip you’d looked forward to? And would we feel like we were having deja vu, returning to the same experiences?
The real world we blink back into has pots and pans, bills and budgets. But it also has sunsets that occur in real time. Plenty of new material for the memory to work on.
Ah, photos of life. It’s a record of who we were and who we wanted to be. Something to keep for the future and for others to ponder on. I would love to be able to look through more photos from the time that my mum was 20 something and yet there’s not much to be had that doesn’t include me in some way.
Who was she? What was she like? What did she like?
Going further back, what was my gran like when she was 20 something? What was it really like in London in 1946/47? What was the Festival of Britain like in 1951? I could ask her these questions – in fact I will at Christmas and let you all know.