I am fascinated by concepts
of how we perceive time and how memory seems so variable, often changing in
each recall. Of course, as a poet, both time and memory are central to my
writing. Maria Popova in a brilliant review of Claudia Hamilton’s Time Warped:Unlocking the Mysteries of Time
Perception used this quote connecting memory with how we perceive time:
It is memory that
creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time. It not only gives us the
ability to conjure up a past experience at will, but to reflect on those
thoughts through autonoetic consciousness — the sense that we have of ourselves
as existing across time — allowing us to re-experience a situation mentally and to step outside those memories to consider their
accuracy.
Maria Popova's superb blog is: http://www.brainpickings.org/
Maria Popova's superb blog is: http://www.brainpickings.org/
Exactly! Memory is so fluid - sometimes hindsight changes everything. I especially like that people remember the same situations so differently. Nothing that happens is fixed because it's all up for interpretation. I'm reading through the old journals. I am often reinterpreting my memories. What is that photo - I can see so many possibilities, but which is real?
ReplyDeleteI wish that I had kept regular journals. It must be wonderful having that continuity. I mostly have jottings, poems, little notebooks. But, I agree with the reinterpretation. The photo is a distortion in the window of my friend Joan's house on the water on Richardson Bay facing toward Mt. Tamalpais. She has a mylar window covering to keep out the sun and it works beautifully for a distorted image. So, the image is her dock, the bay and Mt. Tam.
ReplyDeleteThat photo is surreal - but now "real" to me, too, because I know your location when you took it. Thanks, Duff.
ReplyDelete