Pt. 1 An Exercise In Reminiscence (Because Remembering Is Sometimes Painful)
Something about the wonderfully disruptive snow we experienced in Nashville this week has made me uncomfortably aware of two things (well, lots of things) that I thought I’d already begun to come to terms with:
I love Nashville.
I often wish I was not in Nashville.
I’ll probably pen another photographic series where I write more about these feelings, because much of my portfolio deals with the joys and confusions of ‘place’, but for now I want to catalogue a few 35mm, b&w photographs from the time I spent living in Northern Ireland last year…and in Pt. 2, from a weekend I spent in London.
I’m just now realizing, at the end of an absolutely beautiful, wintery week, that the 6 inches of snow atop the ground outside actually elicited a much more immeasurable response in my own heart and mind. Being fairly stuck at home—I mean literally confined to the indoors because the sheer cold, or to our neighborhood because the sheer lack of roadway infrastructure—must’ve ironically encouraged all kinds of distant memories to surface. During this brief stint in stationary living, surprisingly intimate memories of far-off peoples and places were reawakened.
And now, I ache.
I ache because I have felt belonging in a number of geographic locations.
I ache because I feel a sense of belonging in Nashville.
I ache because I don’t know where this leaves me…which is precisely why I’m making myself publish these words and these photographs without premeditated structure or forethought. Instead of avoiding the multitude of tensions cropping up in my thought-life, my memories, or even my nearing post-grad plans, I’ve decided to lean into them. I’ve decided (rather spontaneously) to exercise the muscle of recollection. Again, the snow helped to super-charge my imagination. I’m left with the evidence of melting white outside, where bunny rabbits in our backyard have left not-s0-invisible tracks, and also with mirrored, mental rabbit trails. Right now, I’m following the one that leads me back to Northern Ireland.
Botanic station, Belfast
‘Napolean’s Nose’ | Cavehill, overlooking Belfast
Something worth noting: recent weather hasn’t been the only thing keeping me home, feeling fairly inactive and more than eager to reminisce. My body has decided to rage against itself in the last month or so. I’ve experienced pain I’m not quite sure how to detail and discomfort I’m not quite sure I want to detail. I’m more disappointed than I am surprised. For one, this is no new journey. What is new is the connection I’ve finally made between my own bouts of physical disease and bouts of creativity, of memory. They seem to have a direct relationship. Or perhaps I’ve just had “more” time? Either way, there’s a rapidly developing body of research on the way humans remember pain (the NIH says-sometimes accurately, sometimes overestimated, sometimes underestimated), on the way men and women biologically remember pain differently, on the way memories and chronic pain are stored similarly and manifest uniquely, etc. Nuanced and wide ranging scientific inquiries abound. In my own experience of reoccurring, chronic pain, it is not something limited (or magically managed) by pre-determined expectation. We live in the pain newly every time.
McKee clock | Bangor, Northern Ireland
Similarly, we live in a memory newly every time we choose to call it forward, every time we really re-exist in it. Sometimes that happens involuntarily, and memories resurface in unwarranted or unwanted ways. In this moment, I am knowingly choosing to exercise the muscle of recollection, and I wonder if a compelling driver is actually that some of my more obvious, anatomical muscles are pretty weak and worn down. Last week, I sat across from a physical therapist as she confirmed the way significant pain had changed areas of muscular physiology in my body. I felt validated, and scared, and honestly—I’m healthy compared to so many I know. As we all are, I am finding a way through my limits and towards joy. The truth is, it’s a gift and a privilege to remember a place like Northern Ireland: its cliffs and shorelines, its billowy grasses and yellow gorse, its seaside shacks, and shops, and weirdly deserted towns, and most definitely the residents that speckle the whole of the landscape.
Friends scattered across a bluff, Cavehill
…So you see, I’m not pretending like this is dirty work. Ha! Only calling attention to the fact that we avoid pain of all kinds like the plague. But to remember or miss something (perhaps even someone), to feel that particular kind of pain, means we have had the real honor of familiarity— right?