' Memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished, and contemplated, or they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs.' AS Byatt: Memory: An Anthology '
The collection of extracts, poems and essays demonstrates the complexity of recall and the capacity of the brain to pull down those things which we haven't retrieved for many years.
A smell like creosote on a newly painted wooden fence always conjures up a summer's day for me when I was eight or nine and I can still see my street, baking in midsummer heat, flying ants everywhere, the sound of the raised voices of other children playing, the endless times of school holidays, when everyday feels like a month and every week a life time.
What is it about time when you are a child? It's possible to recall immensely detailed moments, the smells, the colours, the mood of a particular moment even though it is rarely visited.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Misremembering 29 January 2008
One of the aspects of memory I am going to explore comes out of an anthology on Memory which suggests that people recall the past in a flawed way.
In some cases they are convinced in their own minds that this is an authentic process but they changed their story in the very act of its retelling. In other cases it takes the form of a lie.
William Maxwell:
'In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.' (Memory: An Anthology: ed. AS Byatt, 2008)
My project will include this dimension as part of my character development to show how the past is always with us but also allows us a degree of self delusion and in certain circumstances allows us to mislead or lie to others with the consequences that it brings.
In some cases they are convinced in their own minds that this is an authentic process but they changed their story in the very act of its retelling. In other cases it takes the form of a lie.
William Maxwell:
'In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.' (Memory: An Anthology: ed. AS Byatt, 2008)
My project will include this dimension as part of my character development to show how the past is always with us but also allows us a degree of self delusion and in certain circumstances allows us to mislead or lie to others with the consequences that it brings.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Picture This 27 January 2008
I am going to use photographs from the 40s and 50s to help get the period detail right when I embark on my project.
Bert Hardy was working in these decades and captures some vivid images of the black community in Tiger Bay/Butetown.
He had a rapport with these people - a white, working class, cockney born into poverty around the Elephant and Castle. He had no political agenda but shows how life was lived in a place cut off from the rest of the city of Cardiff. A.L.Lloyd, a contemporary and friend of Bert says a lot about Tiger Bay and its difference:
" -----the area is a slender finger jutting into the sea, bounded on one side by the railway tracks and on the other by the canal, and choked at the top end, the town end, by a stout, black viaduct that seals off the district as surely as if it was a tall iron gate guarded by a white man in blue."
Bert Hardy has done a service to history but photography they say cannot be taken at face value as hard evidence. I am not sure what my perspective is on that but I relate to this quote from Henri Carter Bresson, taken from his book 'The Decisive Moment' (1952):
" We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
"We cannot develop and print a memory."
My job will be to try to recreate something - albeit as a work of fiction drawing, in part, on my mother's memories of Cardiff in the Second World War. In doing so I will have to recollect my memories of her stories but I will also seek out the stories of others who came or come from a different part of the city, a place cut off from the rest of the city but not from history and the events which shaped the lives of everyone living there.
Bert Hardy was working in these decades and captures some vivid images of the black community in Tiger Bay/Butetown.
He had a rapport with these people - a white, working class, cockney born into poverty around the Elephant and Castle. He had no political agenda but shows how life was lived in a place cut off from the rest of the city of Cardiff. A.L.Lloyd, a contemporary and friend of Bert says a lot about Tiger Bay and its difference:
" -----the area is a slender finger jutting into the sea, bounded on one side by the railway tracks and on the other by the canal, and choked at the top end, the town end, by a stout, black viaduct that seals off the district as surely as if it was a tall iron gate guarded by a white man in blue."
Bert Hardy has done a service to history but photography they say cannot be taken at face value as hard evidence. I am not sure what my perspective is on that but I relate to this quote from Henri Carter Bresson, taken from his book 'The Decisive Moment' (1952):
" We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
"We cannot develop and print a memory."
My job will be to try to recreate something - albeit as a work of fiction drawing, in part, on my mother's memories of Cardiff in the Second World War. In doing so I will have to recollect my memories of her stories but I will also seek out the stories of others who came or come from a different part of the city, a place cut off from the rest of the city but not from history and the events which shaped the lives of everyone living there.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Journeys and points of departure 27 January 2008
I am going to carry on exploring further essays on immigration contained in the Penguin collection - 'From here to there'. They span over seventy years of movement between a vast array of places and the UK .It represents the authentic voice of ordinary people rather than data or research filtered through the eyes of academics and statisticians.
Already I am struck by the notion of difference coming through the contributions in the book. Difference as experienced by the new arrivals , through their colour, accent and climate, but also a deeper sense of separateness created by the attitudes and reactions of others.
The other constant theme or question is 'where is home?'
Questions of identity and culture are centre stage. Even 50 years later- after an adult lifetime in the UK - for one man from Antigua these issues recur. He seems comfortable to say home is where his children and grandchildren are, i.e. in the UK, but he still has a sense of longing for where he came from as a teenage boy.
Already I am struck by the notion of difference coming through the contributions in the book. Difference as experienced by the new arrivals , through their colour, accent and climate, but also a deeper sense of separateness created by the attitudes and reactions of others.
The other constant theme or question is 'where is home?'
Questions of identity and culture are centre stage. Even 50 years later- after an adult lifetime in the UK - for one man from Antigua these issues recur. He seems comfortable to say home is where his children and grandchildren are, i.e. in the UK, but he still has a sense of longing for where he came from as a teenage boy.
Starting out
LSBU MA Symposium was rich in diverse projects and people. Now the real graft starts. How to craft and scope the project, make the time for it, be creative, engage with different materials and people, bring clarity and focus - but that last aspect is a little premature - part of the excitement is the unknown, the exploration and the discoveries.
Today I have been doing some web based research and discovered two community websites relevant to the setting of what I want to write. Two emails sent to those sites in the hope I might meet some people who can tell me their stories and memories. It's about the ability to engage with the human part of research. Books, journals, yes, all vital but nothing like the engagement with the personal, to hear it rather than read it, to get the inflections of speech, accent, and the facial expressions as people tell their story.
My subject is war but not the hardware and military side, its a story of two women, similar in age, experiencing the mutual sense of loss, fear, separation of war and personal change, living out lives in two different cultures in the same city - one fully integrated into the life of the city, the other cut off by the realities of race and a bridge which defines a community and keeps it hidden.
Today I have been doing some web based research and discovered two community websites relevant to the setting of what I want to write. Two emails sent to those sites in the hope I might meet some people who can tell me their stories and memories. It's about the ability to engage with the human part of research. Books, journals, yes, all vital but nothing like the engagement with the personal, to hear it rather than read it, to get the inflections of speech, accent, and the facial expressions as people tell their story.
My subject is war but not the hardware and military side, its a story of two women, similar in age, experiencing the mutual sense of loss, fear, separation of war and personal change, living out lives in two different cultures in the same city - one fully integrated into the life of the city, the other cut off by the realities of race and a bridge which defines a community and keeps it hidden.
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