Our understanding of memory often lies in the overwhelming tension between preservation and loss. We tend to reduce the everyday flow of our lives into a series of fragments. Brief passing moments and images remain completely intact despite the passage of time, but the overall framework destined to disappear, to be worn away by ageing and unknown interventions of fate. In this perspective, memory is a form of conflict, where the desire to retain the past as it was runs up against the inevitability of change. Or, a set of counter desires that seek to erase and alter some aspects of the past.
To see memory as a tug war between recovery and dissolution is to blur the boundaries between the individual and the collective, between what is most intensely personal and what is held in common. If we do so, that is because in recent years there has been a shift in terms. Memory has come to stand alongside history in both popular and scholarly discourse. We speak less of the power of the historical processes and change, and more of the fragile resistance of memory and its attempts to preserve what is no longer.
Perhaps we speak so much of memory because there is so little left of it.
—My small note on the nature of remembering, derived from some books and AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)
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