Editor's Note, 4/16

My journal is full of observations, doodles, quotes, autographs, snippets of writing, taped-in ticket stubs, folded foreign currency, post-it notes, postcards, metro cards, discarded brochures, worn wristbands, half-stuck stickers, clipped-out magazine recipes, discarded photos and lists—lists of what I did with any given day, what I’ve watched in any given week, what I’ve read in any given month. My journal is an obsessive, compulsive daily act of literature. Obsessive because my habit now spans three journals full of collected details and moments. Compulsive because I journal almost daily; if I have nothing thoughtful to put down, I’ll put down food I ate, the weather that day and any memorable conversations.

I belong to a lineage of obsessive, compulsive memory-keepers. Half of my parents’ garage is filled with boxes of photos, documents, scrapbooks and trinkets that various deaths in the family have bestowed upon us. A journal that my great-great-grandmother kept while dying from tuberculosis that begins with how-to’s for her about-to-be orphaned children (“how to mend a broken bone,” “how to make a stew,” “how to treat a fever”) and devolves into her copying of hymns about the coming of death (“Shall my soul ascend with rapture / When the day of life is past”). A will from a few-greats uncle that outlines the fates of his slaves along with his property.A book of hair with clipped small clumps from the first and last haircuts of distant family members whose names I don’t recognize or remember.

Last weekend, I attended the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in downtown Durham. One of the films screened on the first day was Kings of Nowhere which takes place in a Mexican village that is partially flooded after the government builds a new dam. Over 300 families used to live in the village, but now only three families remain. The documentary follows these three families as they navigate their own ghost town. In one scene, a man rows through the town in a small boat, gesturing towards vacant buildings. He speaks of the histories submerged under the water, sharing anecdotes about the various families that used to inhabit the town. It feels like he is speaking to himself in some private ritual of remembering, but I know there is a documentarian sharing the boat with him, quiet with bated breath while holding the camera. Watching Kings of Nowhere, I was struck by how dependent the movie was on memory. Characters recalled not just what the village used to be, but who they used to be. The movie didn’t impose any single historical narrative on the village, but opened it up to all of the memories it contained.

Memory used to be thought of in terms of architecture: our brain consolidated an experience into memory by strengthening the connections between neurons as if creating bridges across synapses for neurotransmitters to travel across––the stronger the bridge, the stronger the memory. But recent research in the field of neuroscience suggests that instead, the consolidation of memory more closely resembles how we draw constellations in the sky: certainly there are familiar patterns we trace over and over, but every single time we look up to the sky, we are able to connect the dots in new ways, to make new memories. This suggests that memory is more ephemeral than stable, a re-lived rather than a revisited experience.

When I first became Editor of Recess, I made a list of possible topics that I could write about: graffiti on the East Campus tunnel, jazz at the Mary Lou, why You’ve Got Mail is my favorite chick flick. Over the last year, I’ve written about none of these. In fact, despite being the editor of the arts and culture section, I’ve written remarkably little about art itself. Instead, with each Editor’s Note, I have felt like a documentarian of my own mind, putting my journal up for public display. I attempted to collage quotes, ideas and questions from any given week into a coherent narrative. Looking back at my journal, at the raw material from which I attempted to make these Editor’s Notes, I want to re-write every single one from the vantage point of the present, knowing I would map out these questions in new ways. But I suppose part of leaving The Chronicle and leaving Editor’s Notes behind is recognizing that I am no longer obligated to funneling my disparate thoughts into an easily contained story; I can just let them be.