Ghosts of memory

‘Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.’     

 (J.G. Ballard)

If every significant experience we have leaves a trace on our psyche, a marker for us to learn from so that we might better negotiate the world, then as I approach my senior years (I am 66 at the time of writing this) I am possessed of hundreds of thousands of such traces.

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If these are memories, then paradoxically I have too many memories to actually consciously remember. ‘Remembering’ is an act of consciousness.

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Many of these traces exist out of my consciousness or awareness, sleeping, waiting, ‘unremembered’, in the vast unconscious portion of my psyche. Sometimes my present reality will provide a key – an object, a combination of shadow and light, a smell, a texture – that will open the cage of such a trace and transform it into an unexpected memory. This

memory, this ghost, freshly liberated and reborn, robustly imposes itself into my present reality, changing its significance.

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Photographing that new reality makes the memory permanent, nevermore to be banished out of my awareness.