story

On Gluckman’s

In May we flew to Cork. My Croatian friend had a fondness for the Irish, and I had a growing curiosity. In retrospect, we should never have traveled together. Individually, we're lucky girls, but our lucks seem to sink when joined together. We cried after a spring break fiasco, returning a rental car with shaking hands after a road trip of disasters. We even hopped the wrong train home from the dealership. But, to our credit, past obstacles never dampened our enthusiasm, and so we left for Ireland hell-bent on adventure.

It rained the entire trip. We were broke. We spent our time walking, despite the rain, and overstaying our welcome in coffee shops. For meals, we cooked eggs or ate cold sandwiches stolen from campus. Yet the hardships only increased our sense of excitement: at night we blended into gallery openings, scrawled poems on napkins, and listened to music wafting out of the doors of concert halls. One afternoon we wandered into a church filled with women who were knitting Cork’s weather patterns into an enormous, colourful, tapestry. On another, we wandered past the river and onto the campus.

Thanks to a proud nun at St. Finbarre’s, I now know that University College Cork was born in the sixth century. Though burnt and rebuilt, it still stands majestically overlooking the River Lee, a river which is the pulse and heart of the city. On its outskirts, we stumbled into Gluckman’s gallery, an unidentified architectural treasure. It was late in May, and I couldn't stop clicking my camera: photos of restrooms, windows, views, art. But photos were no longer enough. I began sketching and jotting thoughts into a tiny mauve notebook. The museum inspired doodles and philosophic scribblings about moons and sound. On the Book of Kells I wrote:

It’s such a fascinating idea-- it isn’t merely a decorated letter. It’s about the ideas and images within the letter—the Celtic knots show the ways letters, words, stories are linked and interwoven together . . .there are pictures and images hidden within the letter . . . visual linguistics.

There are photos of our faces that interest me. It was a time of ideas, and you can see, occasionally, thought churning behind a rain-drenched, puzzled brow. The pictures were neat for about a week after our return. But the memory of me fumbling with the camera for a shot of light dancing on the river, while my friend solitarily fumbled with the map? Permanent.

On Military Barracks

It was my last sunrise on the east of the Atlantic. I wanted to remember it.

It’s true that the photos are largely meaningless. I rarely look at them. What I want, now, are the moments behind the photographs. And it’s true, that even without the camera, I would remember everything.

Still, as humans, we yearn to record. We try, in vain, to catch our memories as they unfold. We hope to pin one down in a photograph album, like a wild, crazy butterfly, so that years later we can point to the classified specimen and say, “You see? It’s right here, just so, exactly as I remember it.”

Perhaps I’ll quit carrying the camera. She’s right: years later we remember what we didn’t photograph. And then we write it down.

On Printed Paper

by Laurel

“I wish I had a camera.”

She didn’t laugh. It was probably for the best, since I wasn’t much for laughing at the time. It was all too serious.

It’s incredible, really, the pressure that a single plane ticket can exert on a soul. Each day, one by one, passed before the ticket’s printed date and tolled my appointment with fate. Yes, in a few hours, I would board a plane and cross the sea. First, we would lug the luggage onto the crowded bus, then the crowded train, and re-pack it several times in the airport. I believe, in the end, a tall, freckled girl ran off with my bathrobe.

You’d think that a printed piece of paper would be easy to ignore. Why not skip a flight? It isn’t that I didn’t rave about doing just that. A plane is only a plane: gears, wings, and oil that have no real influence. But I knew at heart it wouldn’t work. It would have only resulted in another piece of printed paper, for another day, on another plane. No, I would have to go, the ticket just another assurance that no one ever really leaves home. And with that assurance came a kind of panic—a fevered desire to live every moment of my trip to the extreme. And, of course, to capture them all on film.

It began innocently enough. I was going to Europe for the semester. My mother and father had never been. They bought me a ticket and some luggage, and for Christmas they gave me a camera. The least I could do was click it. I started with a few scenic photos of monuments, sent home like electronic postcards whispering “wish you were here.”

That lasted until March, when a snowstorm buried Utrecht in ice. Day after day the whiteness built, the campus became a battlefield of snow, and I began taking long walks in the cold. The camera served as a magical eye in the crystalline landscape. My father wrote that the photos held winter faeries, and I began to carry the camera more often.

Yet time was ticking in the back of my mind. Days slipped quickly as spring came with bursts of tulips and bicycles . . . I extended my trip into summer--I had more to do, to see, to say--but time was pressing. It was then that the camera became an obsession. I couldn’t stop clicking: flowers, trees, sidewalks, people, people on sidewalks, flowers near trees . . . I wanted it all preserved. I look back on those later photos and see the acts of a desperate woman, a horrifically weak attempt to make time concrete--the simplest kitschy approach to making the moments last.

It’s absurd, isn’t it? Trying to capture a moment on a piece of printed paper. But perhaps that’s what humans do. We record things. Why? Because we’re story-tellers; we tell stories for stars, stories for atoms . . . We are, at heart, imaginative creatures. And, for good or ill, our imaginations colour our memories. We’re mortal, we’re fallible, we grow old. The present mutates the past, our memories become bigger, better, sadder than they were. Time distorts it all.

1