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MEMORY (IV)

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One of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings articles brought a Jose Luis Borges poem to my attention recently, a poem called “Cambridge.” It ends with these words:

“Somos nuestra memoria/somos ese quimérico museo de formas inconstantes,/ese montón de espejos rotos.”

In one English translation:

“We are our memory/we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,/
that pile of broken mirrors.”

Besides that, I’ve always loved the narrative neatness of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, being the mother of the Nine Muses in mythology: memory birthing art and history.

You can’t possibly remember something exactly as it was, and how you remember it changes over time based on the current you. Alan Watts unforgettably calls memory the “corpse of an experience” and sees it as a reason for our inability to be truly present.

But our past and how we remember it is also what makes us, us. Memory makes “invisibles present” as Hannah Arendt has written. Part of a series.

30h x 30w x 0.5d (inches); linen, cotton, ink, acrylic on wood-backed canvas
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Definition (I)

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Memory V