Tag: memory

Walking – with cloudy canvases

~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment
vibrant abstract art with dynamic flow
Photo by Landiva Weber on Pexels.com

You can know yourself, if you bring up those cloudy canvases from your dreams, today, this day, when you walk awake, open-eyed.

Memory is valuable for one thing, astonishing: it brings dreams back.

Antonio Machado, from Times Alone

There’s something quietly unsettling in Machado’s words — the idea that our dreams are not separate from us, but unfinished conversations with ourselves. Most mornings, dreams dissolve almost instantly. We reach for our phones, our routines, the practical demands of the day, and whatever felt vivid a few moments earlier slips back into fog. But Machado seems to suggest that if we pause long enough to carry those ‘cloudy canvases’ into waking, morning-walking life, they can reveal something true about who we are.

This month, I’m engaging in a daily challenge: a three-mile walk awake, open-eyed. Along the way, unexpected memories emerge from their burrows like the rabbits and hares I meet on the path, their distinctive ears attuned and pointing to the sky. In Machado’s idea of abstract art — of cloudy canvases — I recognise something of the colour and ultimately boundless and borderless shape of my own humanity.

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Roberto Cacciapaglia, ‘Gratitude,’ from the album ‘Diapason’ with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

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I think that’s what makes memory so strange and valuable. Not because it preserves facts perfectly — it rarely does — but because it keeps emotional truths alive. A dream remembered hours later may not make logical sense, yet it can leave behind a feeling that lingers all day – delight, longing, fear, tenderness, regret, hope, melancholy, joy and gratitude. Sometimes those feelings point more honestly toward our inner lives than our carefully organised thoughts ever could.

What I love most about the poet’s suggestion here is its gentleness. It doesn’t demand certainty or interpretation. It only asks us to remain open-eyed to ourselves — to notice what rises from beneath the surface, and to treat even our fleeting dreams as part of the story we are still becoming.

Sweet imaginings

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Do you ever have a ‘tinkering’ sort of an evening? I do. I love them. A bit of lyrical music. A bit of baking. Phone call with an old and valued friend. Pen and wash representation of an Edinburgh lamppost on a thin notepad which – here and there, over the course of a couple of hours – ‘spilled’ into a little collage of imaginings, part memory, part experiment, all absorbing. The other day I came across an encouraging thought on Instagram (or ‘Insta’ as David Kanigan writes it’s now called 😉 ) …

We don’t draw to make perfect representations of reality. That’s what photos are for. Remember that!

Thanks, @linescapes.drawing. Somewhere in my subconscious I must have accepted your invitation / encouragement to a warm evening’s tinkering. Who knows? – perhaps a bit of 3D may develop with a little more dabbling …

Time well spent

~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments

more @gardenstudiogram

I ‘read’ photographs in much the same way I read books: daily and with an eye to every detail. Memory teachers speak of the value in ‘attaching’ images to what we want to remember. I think I’ve always ‘thought’ primarily in pictures and poems but, while they’ve helped recall many things, they’ve been no use whatsoever to my non-existent mathematical skills!

I’ll revisit today’s collection of beach photos perhaps years from now – among hundreds of such collections of the same or similar subjects, and will almost be able to ‘feel’ the flashing of neurons: conversations half heard on the bus, temperature, cloud formation, the first lines of a poem in response to flashing past the familiar outline of Arthur’s Seat, the smell of the sun-warmed salted timbers of the coastal groynes, the extent to which the presence or absence of ‘the haar’ obliterates or magnifies Inchkeith Island set in Blackness Bay, the beach café and what I chose to eat, the evening light, the lines at the bus stop, innumerable details of all that I meet.

Words and imagery are, I suppose, external representations of the inner journals of our lives. While what we think shapes today’s reality and that of our future, that thinking is itself shaped by the ‘photographs’ of every second of our lives lived to date. So I believe that time spent with ‘good’ imagery is time well spent. Perhaps you’d guessed that already? 😉📷

Connections

~ windinmywheels ~ 3 Comments

Niels Bohr discovered that, once subatomic particles such as electrons or photons are in contact, they remain aware of and forever influenced by one another instantaneously and for no apparent reason, over any time and any distance, despite the absence of force or energy, the usual things that physicists understand are necessary for one thing to affect something else.

Why do living things, and perhaps we humans in particular, have lifelong need to connect? Why are we so delighted when little snippets of conversation and encounter have us skipping like magpies between one field of exploration after another? Well, these are rhetorical questions, of course. And mine is the sort of free-ranging poetic mind that is largely content to allow questions simply to exist – without much urge for instant or definitive answer. But I know that connections (not all of them necessarily social connections; I am, after all, a bit of an introvert) – matter to me, and that I have a somehow ‘unlearned’ capacity for remembering countless numbers of them across a lifetime. And so I merely want to drop a place marker here, a note for goodness knows how many future conversations and contemplation; a delighted, awed, ‘wow’ upon having read of Niels Bohr’s discovery detailed above … ‘forever influenced by one another instantaneously and for no apparent reason, over any time and any distance, despite the absence of force or energy.’ This living business, in this Universe, reveals itself constantly as ever more extra-ordinary and – even for flibbertigibbet magpies – everlastingly exciting!

Love and hope and memory

~ windinmywheels ~ 1 Comment

when you go home tell them
of us and say ‘for your
tomorrows we gave our today’

i

perhaps you did not
see one hundred years ahead
yet Sir you graced each

ii

thank you for singing
love and hope and memory
as you gave your all

iii

you did not know me
but sacrificed anyway and now
live in Love in all

SRM – MM Haiku 51 Day 81