Memory, Illusion, and Creating
Prompted by Pireeni Sundaralingam, poet, playwright, and neuroscientist, students in the Spring semester of 2019 were asked to create an original work exploring and interrogating the structure of their own memories.
As a low-residency program, each semester contains a six-day intensive. During this intensive all students travel to San Francisco and study in person at CIIS every day from 10am to 7pm. The intensive includes workshops, readings, assignments, lectures, panels, and small trips in the Bay Area. For Spring 2019, with Ms. Sundaralingam on board as a guest lecturer, a good portion of the workshops were spent:
· examining the neuropsychological mechanisms of memory;
· exploring the methods a variety of artists have used to bring attention to the politics of memory and forgetting, particularly through innovative and more humanistic approaches to memorials;
· and exploring students’ own memory biases and illusions and how as artists they can interrogate the connections between memory and identity in their own work.
Below is a short poetic essay written for the assignment by one the program’s first-year students, Aaron Vigil:
On Memory
The story I tell myself of myself changes often. The beginning changes. The end is always now, by inch or by long jump of an equal sign following a winding equation. The timeline of the plot changes; the most dramatic event may be the least important. The story I tell myself of myself is for myself because the hinges are different than the ones I use with my voice. The story is sometimes wordless. Once, inside and out, there was no story, I said, and that was the story. (But this referred to the voice of the inner self as the harsh-and-dismissive-and-therefore-right critic.) The story I tell myself of myself when I want to reach the furthest beginning sits there as a heavy, frighteningly round planet.
The story of myself is the viewing of and the sensation of viewing and the diving into and the swimming inside and the suffocating under and in the delight of the sun above the spring of my memory. Not all the memory that exists: my memories are my own and those told to me in shouts by my circles (guardians, friends) and by the impeding bullhorn of culture. The color of the spring is the sum story of my today. I stand before the spring in doubt.
I doubt the story of myself, maybe because I’m a writer. I use my memories to decide what seems most important, what the “but then this happened” parts of my life are. I doubt the story because it continues to change. I change, willingly and involuntarily, what the most vital memories are. Where I trick myself — the most dramatic memories may seem unimportant if I sense there’s an underlying pattern that produced or led to these dramatic moments. And because I’m “constructing the story,” even though I’m truly not, I have to decide what my priorities are. Why am I writing this story? Who is it for? Did “interesting” ever matter, was it ever a real idea? If I let go of writing this story, admit to not being the sole author, or the character, or the setting, or the plot, or the ideology, the book in front of me unwinds the threads of its pages and binding and disperses back to the trees it came from. Maybe too simple of an image, but our creations always come from a living and more mysterious source.
The translation of memory into story is communication. The story of myself I tell myself is both a message I want to get across and a message I haven’t heard yet.
You can find us on social media here: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
