I usually don’t type my journals, but here we are. Every day I write in long hand, at least three pages in a composition notebook. The practice is called ‘morning pages,’ and comes from a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I highly recommend it, although, honestly, I have never made it past week 2 of the 6 (?) week practice – but I have been doing the morning pages for a couple of years now.. old composition notebooks sitting in a storage bin, dated, in my closet. Anyway, is a snippet from today’s morning pages. Enjoy.
Today’s musings, meditations, mental mixups, and machinations of my mind have to do with imagination and memory, two quintessential human traits. Both are made up of fiction, the only objective truth is what is happening right here and right now; even as you are reading this, the moment that I typed it has passed, it is a memory and any thoughts you may have about what my fingers looked like across the keyboard, the face I was making, what my desk looks like or if, in your mind, I am even sitting at a desk, is imagination. Memory is a gift given to humans; the fact that we can remember things with such vivid detail is something some animals touch on, but the depth to which we cannot forget poisonous moments (the way that bitch Nikki Demers ruined my life in 8th grade) along with the comforting, the way my great-grandmother (Nanny) smelled (roses and olive of Olay the original pink one) or innocuous things like where the tape measure is (the top drawer of the tool chest outside, and if not there, the junk drawer because whoever used it last did not put it back in the tool chest) is, at least in my limited knowledge of biological science, uniquely ours. Memory gives us history, albeit a subjective one, and imagination gives us the future. I say give, but I don’t know if that is the right word… allow… no, present… no, the present is the now, the zero on the number line, and everything to the right or left on the X axis is the fiction, the memory, the imagination.
Oh, I forgot crows have pretty good memories, too, it turns out…
The crow study:
