Memory Maps

We started making them after the 1st Quarter, and a week or so ago I found that Marina Warner has already beautifully articulated what it is we are doing:

Mapping memories involves listening in to other people's ghosts as well as your own. Dérive - the French for drift - characterizes this approach, rather than more purposeful terms like quest or research, though memory maps demand processes of investigation and endless curiosity and an impulse towards wonder. Memory mapping grows out of daydreaming, reverie, and the unbidden images that come up in the mind. This is writing as fugue, as enigma variations, as ... the phantasmic flow of consciousness. A dériveur arrives at 'astonishment upon the terrain of familiarity,' writes Robert Macfarlane, and becomes 'more sensitive to the hidden histories and encrypted events of the city' - or the country.

I strongly encourage you to read and relish the rest of this wonderful essay and explore the Victoria & Albert's Memory Maps site.

Perhaps my favourite part of Warner's piece is the penultimate paragraph:

As the Memory Maps grow, they will go on connecting different people and places across time and in the present. Such an exchange between images and writings, past and present, memory and imagination, releases energy: the energy of stories.

The energy of stories is certainly what has drawn me back to the Weald, and particularly to the one small patch of it we now spending a year documenting and exploring. I feel inspired to try and find others in the village who have memories of Parson's Wood and weave their stories into my own.

Benjamin at the Rose & Crown

Benjamin's Paris address book

A merry meeting last night in the Rose & Crown - one of our local pubs. This was first time all four of the quarters have reconvened since the Solstice, so it was an opportunity to share words, pictures and photographs, and to make plans. There was an impromptu reading session from our various journals, which sparked discussion about the power and energy of the collective mind. Several intriguingly overlapping ideas, themes and even words emerged.

At one point late in the evening I tried to paraphrase a quote from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project - kindly sent to me recently by a fascinating new friend, Terri Mullholland. It was a feeble attempt at verbal recall and so I've decided maybe the safest place to keep the quote is here. Though I should probably also write it into my journal. Benjamin's words raise the hairs on the back of my neck which means, for reasons I have not yet entirely discovered, they are important:

‘The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior...’

[Walter Benjamin, Exposé of 1935, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 9.]