[...speaking of Cy Tombly] I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him. That’s unusual in itself, in the era of ubiquitous camera phones, but imagine a time a mere 170 years ago, when there was no mechanical way to preserve a face, an important experience, or the beat of the natural world.
Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.
Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely. In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures. When I think of him, I see his keen, intelligent eyes cast askance at me, his thumb lightly resting on his cleanly shaved chin. And I see his thick forearms, the left impinged by the stretchy metal band of the watch I keep here still in my desk drawer, the sleeves of his white cotton shirt rolled to reveal his powerful biceps, his waist trim from an absurdly careful egg-white kind of diet, girded round by the same cracked leather belt he wore for forty years.
But...here’s the thing: It’s a picture, a photograph I am thinking of.
I don’t have a memory of the man; I have a memory of the photograph. I rush upstairs to the scrapbooks and there he is. I’ve lost any clear idea of what my father really looked like, how he moved, sounded; the him-ness of him. I only have this.
[...to Burns Night (2)...]
¡Que haya luz! Kerenza ha yeghes da! Dad/Andrew x