iris open and shut | an event | remember | who can see
memory is written | captured in time | dead of night | what eyes forget
click | in tablets of stone | when electricity ebbs | mind out of time
evidence | everything recorded | truth | faces to fit
of the senses | external | not needed | names no longer
superceded | eternal | data becomes truth | tip of the tongue
life | imagination | belief | transfixed
unlived | leap of thought | unsustained | who we were
except by image | chasms | without reference | immutable
time spent | diary days | memory exceptions | cloud storage
arms around us | photo albums | random access | rain falling
clocks and calendars | imprisoned embalmed entombed | not in our heads | rain remembered
beach with sea | snapshot the hours | resuscitation | monochrome
men and women | the past decays | mouth on mouth | desaturated smiles
pictured children| alive by proxy | two dimensions | look back in wonder
no signal | hourglasses progress | empty terminals | through the ether
key swipe download | broken analogy | connected air | collapsed distance
unlock upload | transferring | no-one touches | anaesthetised
dreams in boxes | stories written | speaking of which | body language
across a planet | words on pages | paper shreds | unfelt feeling
narrative lost | tongues tied | amnesia | dumb show
wires probe | typing clicking sharing | mega giga tera | hands reaching
waves and signals | faces turn down | oceans of knowledge | out of touch
gathering and gathering | bread is not broken | drowned in data | wisdom is ignorance
memory | out of our minds | total recall | history dismantled
a sullen art | madness scribbles | unfiltered worlds | rendered approximate
dark technocracy | furrowed brows | infinity wallowing | thought in codes
devices remember | lifetimes go by | damp squibs | the moment alone
in our fingers | no time to think | misremembered lives | imprisoned forever
the brain in neutral | no need | fizzle out | dies in chains
© BH 2016
Return to (0º) version #1
As I said, a different form from usual: working with the notion of memory and something more staccato to express it. (Try reading in a Dalek voice.)
I've felt for a long time that we've developed a kind of snapshot mentality. We all do it, I know. Pose for photos. Snap, snap, snap. I'm more convinced than ever memories captured like that are gathered while we absent ourselves from the moment.
The same goes for posts and emails. Now, we don't reflect on a significant experience then share it. We frantically recognise it as it happens then stop and share it at once.
It makes us the eternal being-behind-the-camera. Never in the moment because we're trying to catch it. More than this, it forces us to remember the moment captured more than the moment lived.
So memory degrades both in what it recalls and in its function. We remember the snapshot above the feeling; and we remember from the snapshot not the memory. All our lives have trickled from our minds into our devices. Our heads are truly in the cloud.
Worse still, we think we can remember everything this way. But memory is selective. It degrades. Things of importance and significance live on, reinforced by the stories they become, the repeated definitions of who each of is. Now we believe we can file them all away in some virtual vault, safe and solid. But up there in the silicon darkness, memories are decaying just the same. Just not entirely in our heads.
And Heaven forbid the day the machinery lets us down, when some future cataclysm of servers brings our data-driven house of cards crashing in a shower of pixels. There will be no memories then. Nothing to remember. Except whatever slim memories are still rattling round our heads. And we will have forgotten how to find those too.
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