I uncover several recordings from 2011 made in Italy and South Africa that I don’t remember making. Certainly I don’t recall going to those places in my 20s, can’t exactly recall any occasion for going, but I suppose it was a long time ago by now. I’m using the new location feature of my recordings archive (note: this hasn’t been built yet). It’s hard to tell if these have simply been tagged incorrectly — i.e “Naples” isn’t the Naples in Italy — or if this is genuinely something I’ve forgotten. But they are uncanny nonetheless, and have a quality of a recovered memory… which in the best of circumstances, is exactly what my archive does.
One recording appears to deal with participating in an art event at a library. I helped decorate a whole chamber off the main modernist colonnade (perhaps like the modernist Palm Springs Public Library, except I’ve never been here). I only see the streamers hanging near the front, as though I didn’t bother to remember the room layout since I was actually looking outward into the main hall while I experienced what the recording recorded.
Another, from South Africa, appears to be from a time I was enroute to Australia and went exploring just for a few hours. I walk along a trashy yet beautiful Victorian-era street, witht both marigolds and broken parking lots. Nostalgic but I’ve never thought about it since I was there. Despite being tagged in my archive, everything is difficult to place. Events blend.
Some parts of the re-experienced recordings are difficult to place even now — it’s like I had been skipping through them looking for other things forgotten. There was part of a quiz where the answer was Tanzania, and I recalled a land of Muslim shawls and small pyramids in the corner of Africa — not exactly where Tanzania is. But it very much felt like something from another dream, a land starting with D, rectangular and overlaid almost with a grid-like plaid pattern. I had friends there, but it wasn’t a very populated country.
In one recording (either from South Africa or the library installation) I brought out a plastic bag of butterflies along with a tray of parrots and set them in the center of a room. I worry briefly about the butterflies, before remembering that they’ve survived being stored in that bag for years. Perhaps this was after the occasion with the pool…
One time I’m swimming in the pool in the backyard of my childhood home with my dad and brother. It’s twilight and the layout is more rectangular than normal (the hot tub isn’t near the fence). I arrange light for us with a long string of Christmas lights, still attached to the stubby tree. But this too has the feeling of being a recovered memory, and seems to occur in relation to the butterfly bag — but unplaced. Perhaps I listened to an earlier part of the recording later?
There’s only one recording from Naples specifically. For some reason I liked it best, though it was no more crystalline. I could verifiably identify myself, for sure, but I couldn’t piece together enough context (or recognize the voices) to identify who else was there or what we were doing. But it’s odd and interesting to find out that I went to Italy before… and must’ve forgotten. I watch some replay of casual mischief, me going onto the flat roof of
a tall square apartment block. Then I’m inside on the top level of a bunk bed overhanging a window, when I see Dara below. She stretches forward showing her nice hourglass figure and I can see on her silhouette the fine hairs covering her body. I eagerly call out, encouraging her. This causes her to pull back, so I try to rewind time. I do, but it doesn’t quite work — the reset is incomplete. What was I going to do different anyway?
