bottledworder

Most of life slips away.

We go through most of our life without capturing memories. We don’t even attempt to hold on to time passed during most minutes and seconds of most days and weeks and months of our years. Unlike gifts, paper cards of yore, digital photos, clothes, pens–so many odds and ends, things that we don’t want to let go–we let our memories of moments slip away.

Then, we ask ourselves, “Where did the years go?”

Yet, it’s not a bad thing that we don’t save every memory like mementoes stashed away in the musty drawers of our minds. If we tried to, it’s hard to imagine a space that could hold all that mess. A library? A data center? Imagine the pens, pencils, keyboards, smartphones that would all wear out writing or taking pictures of everything that we did in a day. If we opened the door to that archival space, an avalanche would slide down to bury us.

Yet, for the last two decades, we have attempted just that, to save every moment we consider significant, to the extent we can.

My town is going to hold its July 4th fireworks today, on the 3rd of July, perhaps to reduce competition in the sky on the 4th with the not-too-far New York City fireworks. If it doesn’t rain, the experience is going to be pretty amazing.

Streams of people of all ages are going to walk to a nearby park with dogs and kids on strollers. Youngsters are going to mill about in groups. Hot dog stands and ice cream carts are going to have long lines of toddlers holding the hands of their older brothers and sisters. When it grows dark, some of these kids are going to dart about in twinkling shoes and LED crowns and garlands and phosphorescent Tee shirts.

When the fireworks start we are all going to look up. It’s going to be dark in the park so there will be little else to see.

Yet, a big fraction of people will not want to experience their moment directly. They will be pointing their cell phones at the lights to capture the scene as videos and still pictures. Their eyes will be glued to their screens.

People will be telling themselves that they are recording to send the moment to friends and relatives. Yet, really, what they are doing is attempting to save their moment for their future selves. They are going to replay their video or check their photos on their albums later.

Are friends and relatives really going to spend minutes of their lives playing someone else’s videos or swiping through a million pictures? Are they themselves going to go through these multiple shots of the same streak of light or a poorly framed video of something whizzing into view with incomprehensible noise in the background? Is something going to become of these amateurish captures?

We trap moments to save them until our phones get slower, our computers get full, our cloud storage starts asking us for money. We archive away until our archives become just like our memories, to slip away into the oblivion of our storage. All we do is distance ourselves from the immediacy of our moment in the moment, when we could have seen the fireworks, through our screens rather than directly, on the night sky.

If we did experience the moments of our lives directly, we could have had some of the same options, saving them as memories, as we do with our digital archives. We could have gone back, taken up those memories, put them through filters, tagged them, juxtaposed them according to or out of chronology, even altered or blended them.

That is how we remember. It’s easier than Photoshopping or filters on Instagram.

An overabundance of random memories though don’t add up to much just like an overabundance of videos and photos. From time to time, we need to go back to our memories, arrange them, put them in context, make a record and then go back, again, another time, arrange and rearrange them and make a record of our records.

That’s called writing or composing . We frame every memory as we record them, with a beginning and a middle or an end or by using some other structure. Even our dreams have some framework be they time or place layered with our emotions and people.

Framing provides structure. It also provides perspective. It also prevents slippage and disappearance of valuable memories into oblivion.

Yet, framing also provides perspective which, I fear, takes away from the veracity of the moment. But how do you get away from perspective? Memory does have a perspective but so does a camera. There is no getting away from it. We live with perspective. Deliberate framing and culling at least prevents memories from overwhelming us and the mind getting lost in too much.

Increasingly, I feel like framing my own memories this way, whether it is through writing or creating my own galleries of photos is becoming even more important. It prevents social media sites or Google photos, for example, from taking control of the framing. Algorithms will, often, create timelines or compare-contrast frames or frames where some photos are emphasized and others made obscure. They can also bring back old photos at very inadvertent moments in random, strikingly weird ways that can even be painful. When their framing is repeated over and over again through years or even decades, those frames can become solidified as the legitimate memory over what could have been our memories of what happened through our years.

That is not to say that our memories are any more perspective-free than the algorithms’ but there are obvious perils to resigning our memories to them. As AI gets smarter, I suspect some of the weirdness of their perspectives will go away and be replaced by the genial smartness of a relative or neighbor who was there everywhere remembering our moments with us with a better penchant for recalling detail than us. Hence more believable, even to us.

No, thank you. I want to remember me the way I want to. Even when some of my details may not quite hang together. Accurate me and inaccurate me make me the person I am.

I am not ready to give up myself. I have to frame my memories in a way that I know I lived my life myself.

P.S. I tried looking for photos from last year’s fireworks in NJ. I found none. I watched it all in the sky. I remember it all. The photo is from 2017 when I was in South Florida on July 4th.