"Standing Directly Over A Forgotten Source Of Joy..."

We depend on photographs to link us to our past, but they are static, dimensionless things and they fail us. In fact, sometimes they make looking back harder instead of easier -- the past they show seems to exist in its own world, curiously remote and emotionally inaccessible. "Now" and "then" seem to exist independently of each other, showing no signs of overlap, regardless of what we remember.

What I like about the Looking Into The Past project's photos is that they force our physical and emotional awarenesses of time and space to intersect. By informing the eyes, heart and mind simultaneously, they are sort of hyper-realistic. The truths they tell are slightly truer because of their complexity, and whatever lies they tell us are no worse than the ones we are already telling ourselves.

The illusory difference between "then" and "now" is an ever-darkening line that we are always struggling to erase. When we find a way to reach back and connect vividly with our own history, it heals us in both directions, giving purpose to our past while also pointing us onward to the future.

Don't get bogged down in the hurts and dead hopes of the past. "Nostalgia," Don Draper reminds us, "literally means 'the pain from an old wound.'" But neither should you refuse to commune with yourself. We bury our happy memories like so many acorns, hoping they'll help us survive the winter. You may be standing directly over a forgotten source of joy, stored just out of sight. Hungry? Cold? Miserable? Find a soft place in your memory and start digging. Explore your room, your desk, your computer, until you turn up an artifact that makes you real to yourself again.

I just did this now. Here's what I turned up:



I remember every inch of that yard; I will probably never see it again, will never be able to hold this photo up against it to see the changes wrought by time. In this picture, my mother is younger than I am now. It pains me to see it.

But underneath it all, somehow: "Wheeee!"

[Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Six of Cups