I've Forgotten How To Remember
Remembering, for me, has always been a function of the mind imprinting the details of the outer world on my brain so that I could recall them accurately later. In truth, though, I knew it to be so much more.
Back in the olden days (mid-1990s), that was the nature of being a young journalist. Good notes, recordings, they all mattered. But, names, remembering people’s names, faces, small details about their lives. That got me through the door the next time I needed an interview and helped me develop mutually beneficial relationships to do my job. I saw it as a function of getting ahead professionally.
I wanted a way of reaching beyond. To find deeper ways of being with people. But, I was also a young journalist hungry to prove myself. I just wasn’t yet ready to remember differently.
Yet, the call to do just that had already planted itself inside me. It seems the guideposts in my life always point in the direction of the matriarchs of my family. My grandmother Helen wowed me as a child with her openness and willingness to talk with everyone she met. She could turn a walk through the grocery store into a warm hour of conversations and connection.
I’ve had that imprint of her effect on people since then, and now always ask for people’s names. Never refer to someone as “that lady over there”, or “the person behind the counter,” my grandmother said. So, I never did.
It’s a rule—liberally applied—that, nearly 25 years after I realized journalism and I made terrible bedfellows, still wows even my kids.
Earlier this week, my daughter and I went to Granville Island here in Vancouver. A typical, dreary, “Wet Coast” afternoon ended up all the more interesting with a run through my favourite art store.
Inside, she oohhhed and aaahhhed. Not at the paints and brushes, but at how her 53-year-old mom knew the staff by name. I introduced her. We all talked about a massive project I am knee deep into that the lovely Amanda there has advised me on every step of the way. We laughed and connected.
And, my grandmother rose up, reminding me that remembering isn’t about the outer world at all. It is about the in-between. The connection points that we can’t explain, but draw us to each other.
Lately, I’ve spent so much time in that in-between, trying to forget how I once remembered names and details about people as a function of work and re-remember them as connection and what it is to be human, together.
That’s where I’ve been, in my inner world, since I returned from my French residency at Château Orquevaux. That place changed me, gave me a new perspective on the kind of art I want to make, the stories I want to tell. I met some of the most incredible people (whose names and details of their lives are forever burned on me), and found myself challenged to tell stories in new ways.
It’s also how I met collage artist Lisa Pijuan-Nomura.
She drew out those vibes just like my grandmother. The openness, the willingness to connect and see people where they were at. And, she opened me up to collage as a partner to my writing. A way to forget the self-imposed hierarchy orderliness of words and explore that in-between that has always captivated my attention.
So, for the past few months, I put my head down and forgot how to remember. I let myself find new ways of exploring dreams and memories, of telling stories. The two forms—writing and collage—have met and merged for me.
I’m excited and slightly terrified of this new creative trajectory.
I blame my grandmother, who over and over again returns to me in the depths of the night to remind me that repetition is not remembering. It is how we connect in the in-between, how we love, how we show up, how we dream, how we allow ourselves to be moved by that which cannot be locked into position that makes us alive.
