A Company Member’s Point of View: Week Four in the Studio

By Lauren Ferebee

"if a candle remembers a little more than necessary, it goes out. if it remembers a little less than necessary, it goes out. if only it could teach us, while burning, to remember correctly." george seferis

When I was eighteen, someone gave me an unmarked black journal (a journal that eventually I accidentally handed over to the NYU library, mistaking it for an overdue book on linguistic deconstruction). I had started writing in it a few months after my birthday in the waning days of my high school career. In it I kept lists of moments in my life that happened, moments I was afraid of forgetting. I remember being so profoundly overwhelmed that year: going to Europe for the first time, leaving Texas, falling in love, getting accepted to college.

I felt then that life was happening so quickly around me that all I could possibly manage was to pluck out moments - rather like photographs - to record a fistful of things that might guard against the eventual forgetting. And I was afraid of losing these intangible things, afraid of who I might become stripped of written memory - stripped of the ability to point at a map or a picture or a note and say "there" or "I know that" or "this is where I have been."

But surely life is not at all like that; neither is memory. Life forces forward movement - in fact it asks nothing but the simple and demanding task of somehow passing time. The question of "living presently," seems almost tautological in nature. After all, living presently in the most literal sense is not a choice: life compels you into the present, puts you, however unwillingly, into the moment that is constantly ending, constantly beginning again. To say that living presently is a function of somehow liberating oneself, of pushing something behind us and grasping what lies ahead, we ignore a formidable body of psychological and scientific work suggesting that our biological animal selves are conditioned by our experiences, that we are living embodiments of everything we have known.

Then the question becomes one of balance: how do we balance our past with our autonomous sense of "present self" - or do these terms, these thoughts, even exist? It is most certainly a question for philosophers. I don't know much about philosophy persay. I am, though, a writer of things, I am filled with the need to imprint, to inventory experience. I understand a deep fear of loss; I understand it in myself, in my eighteen-year-old self so filled with endings and beginnings.

But I also know that five years after losing my black journal, I still remember the orange tree in the Barcelona convent I visited that year; I have yet to forget the way my feet hurt after three days in Rome; I occasionally smell the hyacinth and newly-mown grass scent of my high school graduation - I even remember the heat of my boyfriend's truck bed where we used to cloudgaze. And all of that makes me think that to forget, to lose, to abandon the "holding-onto" makes it possible to fill the present with the resonances of memory, almost like memory is an instrument that we play again and again and again, in the hope of creating a new melody.