Chapter+One+-+Collector+of+Memories

Multitudes
I am a collector of memories. This makes me different from most people, people who simply store their memories. I believe each person is a body containing multiple ideas, stories, and identities – or as Walt Whitman says, “I am large, I contain [|multitudes].” In this sense, the physical body is just a shell, a place to contain and store the experiences of the past. A place where one’s memories live. If this is true, each person is a storehouse, but this does not mean each person is a collector. A collector does not simply store her memories; rather, a collector continually preserves, revives, reorganizes, and redefines her collection. This is my story.

The Burden of Memory
//"He is responsible for too many memories. He isn't an accidental memory keeper...He has chosen to carry the burden of memory, or rather not simply to carry it, but to hold it high..." ~ Ruth Behar, from __An Island Called Home__//

I, too, have the burden of memory. While I do not carry or hold high the memories of a race, a culture, a people - I do carry the memories of my own life. This is what we all do; we carry memories as artifacts, as photographs, as stories we construct from scent, color, texture, and sound. We might think such memories remain fixed in the past as scenes or events specific to one moment in history. Yet, for those of us who collect memories, who feel the burden of these gathered memories, we know history is not static. A memory does not stay tucked in one moment in time, but returns to us again and again. And when it does return, when the memory's story is retold, the mind creates new layers of meaning. Some might choose to ignore these memories we carry. Others collect them. I do not have a choice. Memories call to me, //Come, see, this moment in your life has meaning//. When this happens, all I can do is write these memories into story. I have no choice. To not tell is a burden, one too heavy for my mind to carry. = =

A Collector of Memories
A collector of memories, I believe, is not the typical collector. Unlike the museum curator or hobbyist who gathers physical objects, the collector of memories saves emergent ideas and experiences. In __How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves__, Paul Eakin claims, “…memories are perceptions newly occurring in the present rather than images fixed and stored in the past and somehow mysteriously recalled to present consciousness” (18-19). From this neural Darwinism perspective, then, memories are part of an evolutionary process. As a person continues to experience his life, he continues to shape memories. No memory is ever “final;” no memory is frozen in time, fixed and solid. If no memory can truly be “saved" as a fixed and final event, what, then, does the collector of memories collect? I would argue that memories, assuming they are fluid and changing, are not collected in the same way one collects physical artifacts. For example, one cannot look at a wedding photograph and say, “Ah, that is my memory from June 13, 1998.” One cannot gather 50 memories, each one different, and claim, “This is my collection from July, 2007.” Each memory may entail one moment or one experience, but the meaning, the impact, the value of that memory is not fully realized in that one moment or one experience. Instead, it is the evolution of that memory that brings value, makes meaning, and creates a self. The collector of memories, then, is not one who amasses a great number of different memories. Instead, the collector of memories saves the process of a memory. That is, she discovers truth from the layers of meaning which occur when revisiting the same memory over time and space. = =

The Art of Memory
//"This Room and Everthing in It" I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory.

I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties... ~ Li Young-Lee, from __the citiy in which i love you__//



//"Your Life" You will walk toward the mirror, closer and closer, then flow into the glass. You will disappear some day like that, being more real, more true, at the last.

You learn what you are, but slowly, a child, a woman, a man, a self often shattered, and pieces put together again till the end: you halt, the glass opens -

A surface, an image, a past. ~ William Stafford, from __Passwords__//

Putting Pieces Together
Think of the self not a whole person but as a person shattered into pieces. Each piece is a memory. How does one, then, put these pieces together? How does one create a self, construct a life? The collector of memories is not simply one who gathers pieces and fits them into place much like one might fit together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, in which every unique piece represents one tiny portion of the deconstructed picture, a life cannot be divided evenly into neat portions. Instead, a life is made of memories which overlap, collide, and change. A collector of memories does not try to force such memories into place, into the self as constructed puzzle. A collector learns a different way to put her life's pieces together. Some might call such self-construction a form of art - that memories stand for ideas the collector believes, that experiences represent knowledge gained. Others might say construcing one's self comes from examining and continually rearranging the pieces of one's past. Knowledge is limited only by the number of configurations one can create. For me, pieces of myself are pieces of a story. I construct with language; my story is as much recalled memories as it is reconstructed memories through poetry and prose.

** Memories and Literacy? **
What is my connection between collecting memories and being a literate person? For me, my memories serve as inspiration for my creative writing projects. My poems, essays, and short stories always begin with a specific memory. As I write, I try to capture that memory with words, just as a photograph attempts to capture a moment on film.