Memory Keeper

I live amidst the comforts of memories….Memories encapsulated within a cup, a plate, a dainty flowered casserole… ordinary paraphernalia in which numerous ordinary meals have been cooked and served by many hands over generations. What do I know about women and men who peer through ornate frames icily looking silently over a table, a cupboard, a settee covered with faded flowers? I memorize their faces and caress the memorabilia left behind to signify and categorize eras, to lament and to comfort the nostalgias of others like me. Infinite possibilities of memories await just to be unlocked …they await moments of nostalgia to be revisited and a keeper who will be a posthumous repository for them.

Relics often become objects of our fetishes. This is because historical memory is inscribed in objects where they become residues of moments in time, about which we reminiscence in context and out of context.  Memory not only memorizes faces but also situations and objects, often theatrically positioned within the nostalgias of the keepers of memory. The men and women sitting on carved high backed chairs next to a teapoy, posing and gesturing, set in backgrounds with theatrical ambience, or a wedding party with multiple rows of people peering at an unseen stranger  in the foreground who would register the moment, project their positions in  histories not only through their personas but also in their associations with objects they pose with .  Handed over from one generation to another, such relics entomb and ensure the longevity and continuation of selective moments in history, and with it they imprison parts of the present using nostalgia as agents of such entombments. In these moments the present becomes prisoners of the past.

The surreal world of nostalgia that lures us to a reality that never was, is a domain of sweet deception that we fall into and re-fall constantly, reveling in its reverie. Fragmented pieces of experience from the past put together like a  jigsaw puzzle with mismatching pieces, the nostalgic world becomes our enchanted space, our little doll house with a warped existence where temporality is collapsed and history is jumbled.  Our time-travel into this enchanted land with atemporal time to savor a familiar presence, a memorized feeling and a yearned moment promises an assurance for our temporally linear existence. Is nostalgia our escape from the banality of the real world? Or, is it our entrapment to a non- existent past because of our discordance with the exiting present? Sadness remains underneath the euphoria of recovery or the perceived recognition of the familiar where time stands still in silence in this world of nostalgia.