This memory soup

There’s a photo of us lying on the road on our way to Jackson Hole. We’d just found a jumping-off point into the Snake River and decided to take an inflatable mattress down. We floated for an hour or so and hitchhiked back up.

Whole sections of that trip with my cousin are lost in my memory: the long days driving, talking, listening to music, watching the countryside sweep by, observing as the parched deserts of Nevada transformed into the mountains of Utah and Montana, and finally the wet greenery of Washington State.

What is this memory soup where I spend so much of my time? Can I go in here and rummage around, as if with one of those dishes for sieving gold? I’ll excavate a chunk of words like this, slap it in the dish and pass it through clear water, shimmying the vessel as I go. Will a golden nugget emerge? The curious glint of some lost scent, interaction or sensation? The photos we took sit like small rocks in the stream; distinct. Everything else flows around them, difficult to grasp and decipher. I remember one evening as we drove the overpasses of nighttime Seattle and talked about how this may never happen again.

Snake River, Wyoming

Seattle was the city on the West Coast that felt most like England, for its climate and culture. Perhaps that’s why it triggered the thought of home, and the awareness that the 3-month trip would come to an end.

What should we do with our memories? There’s a longing to capture all accumulated experience in some static object. It is a desire so overwhelming that it drove the likes of Proust and Knausgård to write absurdly long works.

At its heart, it’s an attempt to make the most treasured things last forever; a wish for all those feelings and thoughts to mean something. Do they mean something if they’re written down? Is it better to capture or to live life? We can do both, of course. And the process of recording and examining life as it is lived no doubt contributes to one’s development along the way.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” (Anais Nin)