Photo a day - April 2013

Images from the everyday.

"These Moments Existed"

www.simluttin.com

Nostalgia is something you should let go of in order to move forward. Or so they say. It's easier said then done, and who really wants to anyway? I certainly don't, and even if I wanted to, it's so much a part of my constitution that it won't leave me.

Having said that, I think more and more I move deliberately toward an indulgence in nostalgia - outside of work that is. Work is reality, anything outside is something else altogether. In that way, my life is an ambivalent and melancholic haze that, despite everyday demands, likes to indulge in moments that existed. 

And what of those memories? They certainly have a funny way of distorting the past and reforming one's idea of what was; moments that may not be anything like what they ever were. As Marcel Proust said, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” We tend to layer our memories with a variety of emotions that distorts the truth; one person's recollection of an event or experience can differ greatly from someone else who lived that experience too. 

So why do we want to go back in time - why do we revisit these moments and places? Perhaps there is an innate comfort in these things, which is somehow nurturing or safe? Truthfully, I want to curl up and live there sometimes - in that space where romance exists and reality has been packaged up and neatly tucked away. 

I read a draft of an essay by Geoff Newton from Neon Parc, Melbourne that he wrote about his exhibition at Arts Project Australia, Video Doctor. It touched on the fact that most artists explore nostalgia at some stage in their career. Nostalgia is a powerful subject to draw from; it's appealing in the context of our desire for an ideal time/experience/place. I continue to think about this as I record a version of some of my everyday moments in These Moments Existed.

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” ― Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

"The history of melancholia is that of an innately human experience of suffering becoming the object of a cultural construct. As a mood or emotion, the experience of being melancholy or depressed is at the very heart of being human: feeling ``down'' or blue or unhappy, being dispirited, discouraged, disappointed, dejected, despondent, melancholy, depressed, or despairing many aspects of such affective experiences are within the normal range. Everyone suffers from this kind of metaphorical melancholia, as Robert Burton said, because ``Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality'' ( The Anatomy of Melancholy, I.I.I.5.), that is, a figure of the human condition. To be melancholic or depressed is not necessarily to be mentally ill or in a pathological state. It is only with greater degrees of severity or longer durations when dispositions are transformed into habits as Burton would say that such affective states come to be viewed as pathological. On choosing to focus on melancholy as a clinical condition, we are faced with the issue of whether it is a disease or some other sort of assemblage of signs and symptoms. But we can rely on the very rich historiography of the theme in literature and philosophy, starting with the Letters of Hippocrates." (The History of Melancholy, Francis Zimmerman, Volume 2, Issue 2, Winter 1995)