2023-11-27 02:48:00
How similar are they to the exercise of memory? I Remember is a memoir by the American artist and writer Joe Brainard, published in the 1970s. With short sentences and brief paragraphs, Brainard alternates vivid memories of his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, replete with traces of a time.
The reading is agile and hypnotic, there is no way to detach ourselves from the succession of images of the past that he tells us, for example, when he says: “I remember how much I wanted, in high school, to be handsome and popular”, “I agreement of a child I babysat following school while his mother was working. I remember how much he enjoyed punishing him for misbehaving.”
From this reading, a mental and emotional operation usually occurs that has three steps. When reading: “I remember my grandfather, the one who lived on a farm, crumbling his cornbread in his sour milk. He didn’t like to talk,” the reader’s own memory immediately appears. Next comes the desire to tell someone. The third thing that happens is wanting to write them. This is mine: I remember the summer when my grandfather gave me a watch that changed color with the temperature of my skin. I remember that every time he drank whiskey, he gave me his olive. I remember that we liked to look out the window of the bar in silence.
Through Brainard’s memories, we activate our own memory. The magnificent thing regarding the exercise is that there are no rules because memories come in short scenes that contain precise details: these colors, this aroma, this action and that’s it. There is nothing more than that and at the same time it is all of that: remembering is feeling, it is bringing a living sensation to the present. But memories are not only built from what we actually experienced, but from what we thought, dreamed and fantasized at that time. Says Brainard: “I remember fantasizing regarding dying and how sad everyone would be.”
Also, Brainard’s texts make us listen to the music of a certain time, they make us know the brands of clothing that were worn, the foods that were consumed, and they also make us go through various emotions. They go from the surface to the depth in a few lines.
Last week I remembered these things: that in the late 1990s my mother would bake a plate of sliced bread with a dash of sauce for dinner. I remember seeing her cry more than once. I remember the terror I felt last Sunday when I thought that they might take away our acquired rights. I also remember the power of memory, the volcanic force of struggle. What did you remember?
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