Constellations
On memories and murals and full circles
A few months ago, I was looking down at my feet during a rainy day, realizing that the rain had washed the Senegal sand off my shoes. The sand had been a reminder of my month spent right below the Sahara, it had stained my shoes a dusty grey until New York rain washed it away. It’s now been more than six months since my return.
When I interviewed Luke Agada for Newcity, he explained that his paintings attempt at answering questions such as “how do you express memories? How do you hold onto memories? What are the tactile qualities such as sound and smell that you can hold onto and constitute a memory?” The mural of the sand dunes at Café Mogador (pictured above) reminds me of Senegal. The stark difference of being in a desert as opposed to a city, now represented as this image on a wall. It felt like a portal that accessed my memories.
There is this feeling I sometimes have when writing, which Agada’s question reminded me of, I wonder ‘how do I describe something to transport the reader to the place I’m writing from? And how do I capture the essence of a place merely with words?’
Maybe the reason I like to write about art is because visuals and imagery are so important to me, and all I really want to do is linger longer in their beauty. To write is to remember, and you have to catch words before you lose them. Images, on the other hand, feel eternal. I can linger on an image for a long time, feeling a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and memories.
I’ve started to notice, and be mesmerized by, these hand-painted murals that exist in bars and restaurants. I’m not really interested in their provenance, or what they depict—I’m more fascinated by the feeling I get when I look at them and feel transported to, seemingly, another dimension. These murals feel like portals to other worlds, but also windows to the past.
Memories are moments to connect to a place, from the place where you are now. It feels like swimming through time, through clouds of past selves, opening doors backwards all the way to a specific place, only to have it suddenly vanished like a cloud of smoke - gone.
I recently finished reading The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner. The entire collection of essays is incredible, but one of the last paragraphs in the last essay really spoke to me.
[...] perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography: the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn. And yet still defined by the actions she took, even if she now distances herself from them. In all a writer’s supposed self-exposure, her claim to authentic experience, the thing she leaves out is the galling idea that her life might become a subject put to paper. Might fill the pages of a book.
This really spoke to me as I’m currently working on writing a book that is essentially an ‘autobiography,’ but I’ve been stuck for some time on how to continue. I now realize it’s maybe because I’m trying to write about a moment that I’m perpetually in, that I’m trying to fill in the gaps as I’m living. Kushner’s reflection made me realize that it’s much easier to write from memory than from the present moment, and that I need to take a step back - shift the perspective to fit a time frame, a container.
I’ve had this newsletter in my drafts for quite a long time, so I think it’s time to publish it and let it go - even though it feels incomplete. In the same way one has to have an ending of an event in order to write about it, I also think that ideas are constantly changing and I’m not always the same person I was when I started a piece of writing. The photo above is my “aura” of this week. I went to a place in Chinatown called Magic Jewelry - they take a polaroid of you and it reveals your aura colors. Apparently, an aura only lasts 3 weeks. That feels like a short amount of time, but it also makes sense to me.
In case you missed it…
gorgeous!