Memory as an act of creation
There is a Toni Morrison quote from an essay (Memory, Creation, and Writing) she put out in 1984 that has slipped its way into my belief system:
Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was–that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
I think it lines up with being the youngest in my family. Inevitably at some gathering a story will be told and it will not match my memory of the event. Or I will tell the story and be told I am incorrect, it didn’t happen that way, it happened this way! However, through the lens of the above quote, right and wrong are not the point. Remembering is the point. Creation is the point. Even better, shared creation and shared memory are the point.
The term ‘memory play’ was first used by Tennessee Williams to describe The Glass Menagerie and many of his plays fall into this category, narrators leading the audience along a story. And they are deliberately unreliable. And, of course, achingly human.
The exploration of memory and creation is not new to art but it is a willing subject, wanting to be recreated, time and again. I think the joy of Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help is how included we, the audience, are. We are all together remembering. We are active participants. We are, in short, part of the memory.
I’ll leave you with a few articles, if you’re will to explore further and another quote that stuck out to me:
Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don’t think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that’s our version of the past. Of course, models decay, and they change. And so we’re constantly reshaping the past.” – John Banville
