Tag: memory

Sweet imaginings

~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment
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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