Storytelling into Memory

Some time ago Lewis Bush was going on about storytelling in the visual book, and complaining that photographers don't study cinema enough, and whatnot. It occurred to me, as I was rooting, piglike, among this cloud of ideas that perhaps I was less interested in literally telling stories, and more interested in leaving roughly the same bootprints in the viewer's mind as telling a story does.

That is, it occurred to me that perhaps emulating the novel (or movie) might not be the only approach. One might do, well, something else. Something unclear. But something else which produces the same effect on the reader as a novel (or a movie). Something that leaves the same traces on the mind as a novel. It is, after all, the traces left behind which matter.

First a little background. For our purposes here I will use the more or less standard definition of story which we may take as essentially the ground truth of some sequence of events. If the story be fictional, well, struggle with that a little. What is the ground truth of "The Snow Queen?" Two children, certain happenings, a reindeer, a queen, and so on. For a true story, a piece of reportage, this is clear, surely? The word narrative refers to a telling of the story. Events may be left out, told out of order for effect, certain events made more important, and so on.

Let us consider memory now, that malleable surface upon which traces are writ, which traces are at this moment of interest.

Your memory may work differently from mine, I suppose. But, this is mine.

When I think of some memory-worthy thing, let us say a job, it manifests as a singular thing, I don't visualize it particularly, but we might imagine it as a box. A box labeled, notionally, as "My Job at X." If I touch the box, shards arise. A person, an event, a project, an office building. Each of these shards is atemporal. I do not perceive them as a passage of time, but again as a singular object, a box if you will. Touching any one of them causes another cloud of shards of memory to arise. Nothing in here resembles, even slightly, a film strip.

What strikes me here is the atemporal nature of these things. It's not that I have a lighting fast brain, and perceive some work project in an instant, it is that there is no instant. The shard of memory corresponding to a project, or an office building, simply is. It has no nature of the passage of time.

To construct, or re-construct, the passage of time I need to string together shards of memory by an act of will. This happened, and then that happened, and then... In effect, I construct a narrative by choosing some path through a continuously arising cloud of atemporal memory shards.

When one memorizes a poem, one commits individual shards of memory to mind, one by one. The first line, and then the second line, and then the third one. Each line is, I think, a timeless shard of memory. It simply is. Touch the first line, speak it, and the shard of memory that is the second arises. Speak that, and the third appears, and so on. This creates a notable problem for musicians, and professional reciters of poetry: if you get lost in the middle the game is up. There are specific memorization techniques which build anchors mid-piece which allow you to recover the chain easily, but it is certainly a chain for most people. Mozart may have been different.

So here is the really interesting observation which I, um, observed:

Of all the physical objects in the real world, the one which most closely resembles a shard of memory is the photograph.

It is atemporal, it simply exists. One apprehends it in a moment. It is, like so much of memory, visual.

Now, to be fair, upon close inspection my visual memories do not in fact resemble photographs literally. I cannot drill into the visual by peering closer, to examine so and so's nose. But still, they feel a lot like a photograph. They feel detailed, complete, and above all, static. I can construct the movie, the moving picture, but only as an effort of will and the result is not very satisfactory as a movie although it is perfectly good as a pure narrative, tethered not to any medium.

Let us revisit the traditionally told story for a moment. The novel, or the movie, or whatever, relates a narrative which reveals, to some degree or another, the story. Both are left, in fragments, in our mind. I can recall bits and piece of Conrad's Nostromo although I have to struggle to recall the name of the main character which is curious because it's the title. My recollection is all muddled up with my probably half-assed understanding of South American politics.

A quick skim of wikipedia refreshes my mind on the story which in turn brings back to mind the critical messages of the narrative (although I am certain most of the clever technical elements of the narrative are completely gone). Conrad's usual themes are in full play here, rendered hot, sunny, and more or less tropical.

This is, I think, typical. What I am left with from a novel, a news story, or a movie, is the bones of the story and the general tone, the message, that the narrative was seeking to carry. These things happened, and that guy was villainous.

So this provides a sort of template we could look to, if wish to emulate storytelling with our visual book. Provide some notion of the ground truth of the thing, and also an impression of the message you wish to carry.

We can think of visuals, especially photographs, as carrying two distinct roles here. The first is simply to reveal the story in some sense, to provide an illustration of the ground truth. Whether the reader recalls the specific photograph or not is irrelevant, the point is that the reader recalls that the thing depicted was. The second role is as a literal memory shard, a photograph might sit in the memory as one of those irreducible atoms of memory, to be conjured up when the book (or story) is recalled.

To return to my favorite visual book, Minamata, I recall a handful of photographs. Tomoko, Shimada and Kawamoto negotiating, and what seems to be a composite memory-shard made up out of several photos of patients (victims) dancing and moving. There are a handful of other profoundly strong photos in here, but they do not pop out at me until I open the book. The story I can conjure up fairly easily. I can re-string the shards of my memory into a rough narrative, although it tends to wander off into DDT and Three Mile Island and so on.

I am struck by how few of the photographs play the second role, here. The many pictures are not worthless, of course, but most of them serve to document the story, to shape the narrative. They do not sit in my memory as themselves.

Smith's book is not a strictly linear narrative, and it does not particularly resemble a novel. It is a loosely related series of essays, each illustrated by photographs. Some of the material is chronological, but not all. Some is background, some is historical, only the core of the book is really a series of newsworthy events related in order. I think one can go further, one can be more fragmented, more almost hallucinatory.

I see now that my magazine, Alley (available on blurb, $8, a tremendous bargain, buy one for all your friends), heads in this direction. The story is nothing much, just that there is an alley behind my house, and that it has certain features, and that alleys have a certain history. It isn't even a series of events. But it is impressionistic, and the narrative flow, such as it is, simply disintegrates by the end. That is on purpose. The message of the narrative is not complex, only that I love this place, this long and narrow plaza behind my house.

There may even be a couple of pictures in here that stick in the memory, but many of them merely serve to reify the place, to prove that it is, that it was, that it has in it these things.

I think I'm on the right track, but I'm not sure where to go from here. Stick around, maybe I'll figure something out!