From Susan Stewart's On Longing:
- The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale.
- Capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is exemplified by the souvenir.
- The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body.
- Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.
- To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy.
Margin notes from our discussion:
- A remanent
- Our bodies as a home
- Own your thoughts, own the things that make you you
- What is "exotic"?
- (I circled "authentic" and boxed "loss")
- Fortune cookie fortunes: the visuals of the environment in which you receive them, the colors/textures of the experience (intangible?), the people
- Peeling away the layers
- The process of making meaning - why do certain things stick with us?
For Little Laura, caterpillars were a token of a day well spent
My freewrite:
One of the first things I think about when I think about mementos and memories is smell. It's truly the way I access my past. Of course other senses matter too, but there's something undeniably evocative about smell. I can throw a few out there: waxy crayons in the thick wooden cupboard adjacent to the tiny kitchen window at grandma and grandma's house; stale coffee and cigarettes and citrus spray in dad's car, especially the old Fifth Avenue with the sagging fabric ceiling; watermelon-like freshly-cut grass at the old Manhattan house and that cool yet metallic smell of the sprinklers we used to play in during the summer; the sweet plastic and rubber of the tub of Halloween party favors I kept in my closet and would take out to play shop; the "merchandise" scent - in a cheap way, almost sugary but also a bit off, a bit rank - of Beall's Outlet, and then the contrasting richness of expensive cologne in department stores at Christmastime...
Speaking of Christmas, I will never forget the smell of warm plastic lights around the tree, and musty, dusty cardboard boxes from the garage, and mom's favorite Storm Watch Yankee Candle she always lights when we have company, and the homey fragrances of dishes cooking in the oven and on the stovetop. Things being made and being shared. Things becoming so much more than what they are. I could go on and on recounting, through smell, places I've experienced. I am astounded by everything I remember and even more so, how those things remember me.
Looking back on what I wrote:
It's obvious that the process of making meaningful mementos is intricate and intimate. Although I talk at length about smell, my freewrite is not entirely tangential; in order to make sense of the project and choose something really important to me, I have to riffle through my memory files, most of which I access first through scents, then visuals, then sounds, then taste and touch and so on...
In fact, right now I'm listening to a song that will forever remind me of the International Dance Olympics competition I attended in Riesa, Germany when I was fifteen. I immediately liked the song, but the space in which I experienced it was so strange and surreal: a large, wide-open arena that was mostly gray except for the bright blue and red stage, smelled like cabbage and doner kebab, and was very, very cold. (It was snowing outside, since it was late November, but I have a feeling that even during the hottest days of the summer, the inside of the Erdgas would be freezing.) The entirety of my experience in Germany was dreamlike and so rich in detail that I have difficulty narrowing down what materials I would want to emphasize were I to do my memento based on this trip.
And that's the trick, isn't it - deciding what to put in and what to leave out.
One More Thing...
