I am writing this part in response to class yesterday and part as a prelude to my precis. Its a first draft so it's a little rough.

November 8, 2006

Taken From My Sketch Book

During class on Tuesday, I particularly like Dan’s comment that, “Society is obsessed with memory…maybe we need to forget some stuff,” and I want to write down my own thoughts on memory, especially because so many of us in the class are talking about memory and history.

It seems to me that there is an obsession with memory as the vehicle used to perpetuate our ideas through time, but this can become dangerous because it can also promote the stagnation of ideas. I prefer to think of memory as a means of understanding our place in the world and also in the moment. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, we use our memories of other times and places to help us understand the situation and to inform our decisions upon how to act in the space. If we also use our traditional physical senses to understand our place in the world and the moment, then, arguably, memory can also be thought of as a sense. Thus as a sense, its presence is arguably as important as its absence.

Ruins and fragments are largely useless objects. They are the remains of a cultural aspect that has lost it value and the history that they carry can only truly be read through archaeological investigation, which itself is often no more than a hypothesis. However, ruins fascinate us because they are enigmatic objects that arguably speak more of loss than of memory thus they are able to capture our imaginations. To understand them, we must project our own memories upon them because this is, as Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz suggests, “the tendency of our minds to fabricate when confronted with forgetfulness.” (Suárez-Araúz 6) He continues, “when we find ourselves unable to remember a particular word, we are compelled to seek out instantly an approximate synonym, metaphor, or metonym to stand for the word…a mental process akin to the basic associative act of poetic writing.” (Suárez-Araúz 7)

Bachelard writes, “We are never true historians, but always near poets,” because when faced with the void between memories, we understand them by writing a near fiction that fills that space between them. We project our fragmented memories into the void and this act allows us to feel, to dream, and to create and I think it is more important to find the creation of new ideas through projecting into forgetfulness rather than perpetuating ideas through memorial until they become stagnant.

I am interested in the idea that history exists so that we can invent and the idea that the decay of a building is not its death cry to be enshrined in memorial, but rather a process that opens the opportunity for it to have new lives separate from its original program. I have a dream where instead of drawing site as topography lines, we draw it as the remains of buildings.