...Remembered Some of What I Remember

If I tell you that I went to see that Daniel Kitson show again tonight, will you promise to believe that I'm not stalking him? I have a boyfriend. I'm fairly stable emotionally (well, most of the time) and while I found Daniel Kitson endearing, I am not about to start chasing after him from country to country just to sit in the front row of his show every night and then sneak into his hotel room while he sleeps to write love notes in lipstick to him on his bathroom mirror. P.S. If I was to do something like that, I would use pink lipstick and dot all the i's with love hearts. But as I wouldn't, I guess that's not so important.

Anyway....

I went to see the show again tonight. The reason I went, while I did enjoy it and didn't mind the thought of a second round, was mostly because I really wanted the chance to look at it objectively. To listen and to watch with clarity. Because the first time I sat in that room with this slightly odd, bespectacled chap in brown slacks, surrounded by battered suitcases that became beautiful, light-filled dioramas - I was overwhelmed with the emotion of remembering; by the essence of the very thing that he was putting into words, that he was able to describe, that he was sketching out over the framework of how he felt about the flat he lived in for six years. And so I behaved very strangely after I'd seen it. It opened all these little light-filled suitcases inside me so that they were beaming memories I'd forgotten I'd remembered. And I couldn't look at it all objectively. There was just too much emotional white noise inside me created by rooms, and places, and people, and a potted plant on the bench, and a fish bowl filled with cigarette smoke, and Chanel N0.5 on a mohair jumper. I went quiet. Then surly. Then picked a fight (a small one, thankfully, and with my partner not a stranger in a bar). Then became suddenly and unjustifiably weepy considering I was neither pregnant nor a couple of days shy of my monthlies. Very odd.

So after a second viewing, I'm glad to say I've managed to avoid the weepies. The second time around, I realised that the first time I saw the bespectacled man and his suitcases show, it not only triggered the act of remembering but also the realisation that those things you remember (underneath it all, no matter how fond the memories are) actually sting as you remember them. They remind you what you've lost. What you were to never have, that you once believed you would. But mostly, they're painful because they remind you that for everything you've remembered, there are things you've forgotten. Memories lost to the place you left them.

And the bespectacled man in the brown slacks pointed out that that's why we keep things like bits of paper and other useless objects - because they help us to hold on to those memories we'd lose without them there to prompt us (and it seems pretty obvious when I repeat it here, but I guess you'll have to take it on faith that it was pretty freaking profound when he said it). That's why we have the impulse to watch a favorite film over and over: we do it because it returns us to something from the past. It helps us to remember the time when we first watched it, or the last time we watched it, or the time we watched it with so and so. Like last night, Speed was on TV and I was inexplicably overjoyed. In my eyes, Mr TV had done me a HUGE favour. Imagine a five year old unexpectedly being told she gets to to choose ANY cake she wants from the Women's Weekly cookbook to be made. ANY of them. The castle, the train, even the swimming pool of jelly cake. Yep. THAT'S PRETTY DAMN EXCITED! So of course I watched it. And loved it. Like always. I even started writing a post about it (which was aborted due to arrival of boyfriend and then the needing to sleep). This is where it got up to:

What I Did Today... Watched a Movie about a Bus and Remembered 1994

Speed (1994) was on TV tonight. As you can tell from my date annotating of the film title (a typing nervous tick I picked up during my four years studying film at university and just can't seem to shake) it was released in 1994. That is a wee little while ago. There are babies born in that year who are eligible for their L-Plates now. True story. However, by virtue of me being born in the year that The Empire Strikes Back was released, I was fourteen by the time Speed rolled around. I went to see it at the cinema with my friends. I remember the outfit that I wore.

It's clear to me now, that actively remembering the things I've remembered has sneaked up and taken hold of me. Without even realising it, seeing the bespectacled man's show last week had prompted me to write a blog post last night about a film starring Keanu Reeves in SWAT uniform saving the passengers on an exploding bus. From seeing the bespectacled man's show again tonight, I now know why I was doing it. Why I'm compelled to watch a film I've seen countless times before. Not because I really like Keanu Reeves in SWAT gear, but because it helps me remember the time when I was fourteen.

And thinking critically about all those objects in my life that I've held on to, and hold on to, and what exactly they make me remember: it changes them all slightly. Like the Cindy Sherman postcard that I bought at Tate Modern last year that reminds me of being in London... but that I bought because it reminded me of studying Cindy Sherman at uni, which at the time made me think about the trip to Sydney with my mum when I was nineteen where I saw a retrospective of her work, which I went to see in the first place because it reminded me of studying her photographs in high school. Thinking critically about why I put that postcard on my fridge, it suddenly becomes a Hall of Mirrors of Memory. Like I guess it does every time you stop to remember what it is you actually remember about something.

Gosh that's an exhausting thought. I don't think I even have the energy now to go write those love heart i's on Daniel Kitson's hotel bathroom mirror. Pity.