Footfalls Echo...

Time and memory: recurring themes in my scribblings in these pages. One might argue that at my age, this pairing are the natural focus of an old person running out of the former and struggling to retain the latter; but not so. I have been obsessed with their nexus as long as I can remember: the elasticity of perceived time; the encapsulated and frozen time of photographs, time and memory as linear spoken or written narrative: and how these impact on memory itself; remembered, cellular, folk, false or otherwise. We are memory. We are our collected, collective and entwined past; our futures merely pasts-in-waiting: potentialities, possibilities and probabilistic: no more than that until time ensnares them in its flow, encapsulating the now into the past; always one step ahead of us, controlling the arc of our lives.

We are born tabula rasa. We grow, learn, experience and become some-thing, some-one: we carve our narratives out of time itself, forming our own past narratives alongside those of the ones around us, settling them into the fabric of memory for the period of our being, making connection with family and friends, enemies or critics and in the memories of those oh, so sweet fleeting acquaintances of the chance meeting of souls on the fringes of our personal society: all our shared, verbalised and tactile memory is settled likewise in the memories of those others we've touched throughout our all too brief existence, living forward in the narrative arcs of others; moving generation through generation and moulding the past in the passing of the present.

We are memory. Even when our internal landscape is stolen by age or disease, our contribution to the collective memory lives on in others. Memory is immutable within the finite bounds of existence itself; for as long as there is living memory, there will always be collective memory. Memory ceases only when we, collectively, cease in entirety. What happens to all the expended energy that the creation and maintenance of memory entails is anyone's guess, and this remains one of the great imponderable mysteries of the human condition, but suffice it to say, all of us will live on in the collective memory as long as it itself exists...