Laura Esther (she/her) // Video Production
The life cycle of a memory is determined by two factors—Relevance and Coherence. Without them, we would be flooded by the continuous stream of potential memories that pour in through our senses. Relevance captures what it decides to capture as soon as it happens, as an instinct triggered by the outstanding; however, what it perceives as outstanding depends on the countless variables of subject, context and timing. That’s how we sometimes forget critical parts of a discussion we had the day before but remember the dialogue of an unremarkable movie we saw two years ago. Relevance freezes certain moments and allows them to float in the sea of non-memories; but, over time, these frozen moments are bound to melt… unless Coherence gives them meaning. Relevance doesn’t work without Coherence because it’s not about what we remember—it’s about why. That is us in a nutshell; a memory is the basic unit of self, as a grain of sand is the basic unit of glass.
However, everything changes when we go to sleep—the melted pages of our incomplete narratives evaporate. Then, when we dream, it hails.
I woke up the other day and I could almost feel my mom’s old jeans wrapped inside my arms, as my brother and I held onto her legs—there was one for each. Through the turbulent ride, I would stare at strangers’ faces until they stared back, and then switched. It wasn’t easy to get onto the bus in the first place; they were often packed, and kids didn’t pay so bus drivers pretended not to see the woman with two toddlers. Our transit system was barely a system, probably because the vehicles that served public transportation were privately owned, and since there were no bus stops, they could stop anywhere.
Revisiting a memory is almost like walking through a room in a modern art gallery. Relevance provides the snapshots, usually blurry at the short notice spontaneity provides. We wouldn’t get much meaning beyond these aesthetic images without the small white squares kindly provided by Coherence—it places them next to each snapshot with the title and description of the piece. When we dream, we walk into a gallery with no walls and mismatched titles; with snapshots we don’t recall taking and many that seem to be upside down. For better or worse, we never enter the same gallery twice. That night, I stared at the un-matching curtains that hung from a nylon string above the passenger’s windows, the coloured route signs that covered half of the windshield, and the driver’s arm waving vigorously out the window to announce a risky left turn.
Buses were far from fancy, but they came every five minutes and stopped even when they were full—whether to squish in or not was a personal decision. They usually had a mismatching door, seat cover, rubber matt, door handle and other pieces that belonged to buses from different generations; all held together by dirt. I didn’t mind holding my mom’s leg, but I preferred sitting in her lap. I couldn’t understand how she knew which bus to take, or maybe we got lost a few times and I just couldn’t tell the difference. She always opened the sliding door effortlessly, even when I reached it first and failed to open it using both hands. Anyway, after I woke up, I found myself walking through all these random snapshots without really understanding why I recalled so much about bus rides that happened so long ago. So, if I don’t remember this because it made sense, maybe I retained it because it didn’t.
It’s not about what we remember—it’s about why. But maybe why doesn’t have to do with logical meaning, and Coherence is not there to preserve the consistency of our narratives, but to challenge them.
All of these slightly outstanding occurrences that stuck around in my memory are there because, even though I didn’t understand many things, I was sure about one. Something was wrong. What little ones don’t understand they can often feel, and that feeling is enough to retain the details. It didn’t make sense to that little girl holding her mom’s leg, because she was too small and her perspective too narrow to understand that she was not the main character. This story is about the woman who was trying to get home in a country she didn’t know, with buses that wouldn’t stop for her, strangers that wouldn’t offer their seats, and two little people that obliged her to stand because they needed a leg to hold on to. She would hold herself from the handles that my brother and I couldn’t reach, but even so I would have chosen her leg any day.