These Creases cont.

Haruo Shirane writes in his book Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural memory and the Poetry of Basho that, in the Edo culture; "the ability to create the new out of the old was generally a more highly regarded form of newness than the ability to be unique or individual". Of course, most of today’s scholars of the postmodern ilk would argue that being unique is impossible from the get go - that any text is only ever conceived, created, interpreted and understood via the previous experiences of both the author and the viewer and that the intentions of the author as to the meaning of the text are tenuous at best (the poor fellow is only just recovering after a vicious thesis bludgeoning by a certain Mr. Roland Barthés).

The point that i’m trying to make is that it is not the new or the unique that matters, but rather what remains. Experiencing the present is impossible for us. We live our lives through our memories and it is with our memories that we construct an identity for ourselves - minute fragments of experience that weave together throughout our lives, constantly building and reshaping that abstract concept we call the self.

Our present is constantly belated - in the minute amount of time that it takes for our eyes to collect the light from the outside world, send it to our brains for interpretation and the eventual image that appears in our mind to form, that instant has already come and passed and we are presented with a glimpse of a world that is already lost to us.

We live in our memories and it is our memories that make us who we are.

How then do we document this lost world? How do we begin to successfully map something that seems as simple to us as our own lives when, under scrutiny, we realise that so much of it is already lost to us; that even our most present experience has already fallen victim to the passage of time? The truth is that we can't. And yet, perhaps there are other ways of considering it.

Just as the experience of the world leaves its traces upon us, so do we leave echoes of our passage on the world around us. Like the crease on the blanket, these traces point to our space in the world. Like the negative space of a letter form, they give us our shape.

Through the experience of memory, these traces represent that part of ourselves that is always present, and though an examination of them we can maybe begin to understand, if not experience, that part of ourselves that is always lost to us.

These Creases

We touch the world and the world touches us. With every instant that goes by, we leave echoes of ourselves on the world around us and the world in turn leaves its marks upon us. Our lives are a myriad of infinite, constantly shifting experiences ranging from the very tangible hello-goodbye handshake to the constant reorganization of the semiotic framework that forms the foundation of who we are, and with every experience, traces of its passing become embedded in the fabric of our world.

The thing about traces is that they are everywhere and everything. The creases in the blanket may point to the person that lay there, but the blanket itself is an index of the cotton plants from which its material was gathered and of the processes by which the cotton was refined, spun and woven, bleached and dyed, packaged and sold so that it may one day end up on the bed to be slept upon. The blanket becomes a text to be read; to be deciphered and interpreted. It has imbedded upon it the traces of all that has come before it, both physically and symbolically, and through our most often unconscious consideration of this blanket we in turn imbue it with new possibilities, just as it does us. Having considered this blanket, even unconsciously, we now carry its trace with us, to shift and subtly alter all our perceptions to come.

As for the person who once slept there; he’ll come soon.

Because nothing exists in isolation.