#272: On birthdays, memory poems and loving your forgetful heart

Hi there.

I turned 33 yesterday, and amidst all the mango cake and cyanotype-ing, I was confronted with a flood of memories from birthdays growing up. The round table at my grandparents’ place around which every birthday cake was cut for the first decade of my life, the Facebook era of birthday reminders and strangers writing on your ‘wall’, and ridiculous traditions like ‘Birthday bums’ and smashing cake on the face of the ageing soul.

And then today, I read a piece titled The great forgetting by Kristin Ohlson in Aeon about childhood amnesia, which I’m also familiar with. In the article, Kristin writes, “…we are not the sum of our memories, or at least, not entirely. We are also the story we construct about ourselves, our personal narrative that interprets and assigns meaning to the things we do remember and the things other people tell us about ourselves.”

There’s so many layers and struggles surrounding my memories that reading the article opened up. But mostly, it was fascinating to learn about what goes on biologically in our brains to store a memory, or the process of neurogenesis, which can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.

A few lines from Terry Pratchett before we get into poetry and other things:

“I’m made up of the memories of my parents and my grandparents, all my ancestors. They’re in the way I look, in the colour of my hair. And I’m made up of everyone I’ve ever met who’s changed the way I think.”

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Poetry Corner

Art by Bob Buys

1. A Path In The Woods by Anna Kamieńska

I don’t trust the truth of memories
because what leaves us
departs forever
There’s only one current of this sacred river
but I still want to remain faithful
to my first astonishments
to recognize as wisdom the child’s wonder
and to carry in myself until the end a path
in the woods of my childhood
dappled with patches of sunlight
to search for it everywhere
in museums in the shade of churches
this path on which I ran unaware
a six-year old
toward my primary mysterious aloneness

2. The solitude of an apricot by Carl Adamshick

Away from leaf touch, from twig.
Away from the markings and evidence
of others. Beyond the shale night
filling with rain. Beyond the sleepy
origin of sadness. Back, back into
the ingrown room. The place where
everything loved is placed, assembled
for memory. The delicate hold
and tender rearrangement of what is missing,
like certain words, a color reflected off
water a few years back. Apricots and
what burns. It has obtained what it is.
Sweet with a stone. Sweet with the
concession of a few statements,
a few lives it will touch without bruising.

3. Pedrouços by Fernando Pessoa
Translated from Portuguese by Richard Zenith

When I was little 
I didn't know
I'd grow up.
Or I knew but didn't feel it.

Time at that age doesn't exist.
Each day it's the same kitchen table
With the same backyard outside,
And sadness, when felt,
Is sadness, but you aren't sad.

That's how I was,
And all the children in the world
Were that way before me.

A wooden latticework fence,
Tall and fragile,
Divided the huge backyard
Into a vegetable garden and a lawn.

My heart has become forgetful
But not my eyes. 
Don't steal from them, Time,
That picture in which the happy boy I was
Gives me a happiness that's still mine!

Your cold flowing means nothing
To a man who cuddles up in memories.

(Pedrouços is a neighborhood on the western edge of Lisbon where Pessoa spent much of his early childhood, at the house of his great-aunt Maria and her husband.)

4. Inessential Things by Brian Patten

What do cats remember of days?
They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place of food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil,
the usefulness of dust.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
of their owner´s footsteps,
the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as of no worth
they sleep sounder than we,
whose hearts break remembering so many
inessential things.

5. Remembering by Dana Naone Hall

How you bowed
to the new moon
of every month

Morning brings
the smell of rain
and incense burning

Traveler’s palm
waves at
the top of the hill

Each spring
we returned to the city
where you were born

What happened
to the pocket watch
from another century

And what became of
the penknife used
to sharpen the pencils

The trees you
first planted
are all gone now

Reading by
the glowworm light
of a kerosene lamp

The north side of the house
stays cool while the south side
burns with the sun

Not content to love
the singing thrush you
call it by another name

The dogs are silent
even though
the moon is full

Remembering
when we
were one

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Inspiring things

• The First Photographs Ever Taken of India

• Austin Kleon’s typewriter interview with Mary Ruefle

• Sungai Design: The Trash Transformers

• The ABCs of Grateful Living: A Practice (My favorite: “I’m grateful for questions, especially unanswered ones; they keep me alert.”)

• A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau’s Trench Art

• Union is a new magazine spotlighting artists from Palestine and the diaspora

• Something About the Sky: Rachel Carson’s lost serenade to the science of the clouds, found and illustrated by Nikki McClure

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From Mailboxes to Archives at MAP this Saturday! 💌

The Museum of Art & Photography Bengaluru’s latest exhibition Hello & Goodbye: Postcards from the Early 20th Century brings together 80 postcards from their collection on public display for the first time. I’m excited to be part of an open community sharing event, From Mailboxes to Archives this Saturday, April 6th, 4.30pm, to share some artifacts from my personal collections of letters, postcards and correspondences, along with Ishita Shah (Curating for Culture) and Radhika Hegde , Srinidhi Prahlad.

Do come by if you’re free, and bring along correspondences and anecdotes you’d like to share.

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The Alipore Post Poetry Month

Also, if you didn’t already know, The Alipore Post Poetry Month is on in full swing. I’ve lost count of how many people are posting their poems and tagging me on Instagram but follow along on #thealiporepostpoetrymonth to read all the gems pouring out.

And if you’d like to write with the community, catch up on Day 1’s prompt and get penning already! All deets here.

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Please go drink a glass of water after you read this.
Good night for now, dear stranger. 🌙

Manifesting summer rains and delight through April,
Rohini