Remembering the past
Keely's time capsule post motivated me to fill out the same sort of thing for myself, but I don't think I want to post it here. Since I never spent more than four years at any one school after elementary school, the five-year jump is amazing for the way it vaults over entire periods of my life at school.
It reminds me, though, that on my 24th birthday in 2003 I thought of doing a project called "Method of Loci" which would rely on the fact that I live at 24th Street (and am pretty familiar with the lower-numbered streets in San Francisco because I used to live at 3rd Street and work at 8th Street. I wanted to be photographed at an intersection of each numbered street in San Francisco from 1st Street past my old corner on 3rd Street up to my corner at 24th Street, (There are some minor difficulties because there is no single street that runs from my old neighborhood into my new neighborhood and intersects all the numbered streets -- but that's OK, because I could just walk side to side and be sure of getting all of them.) At each intersection, I would be photographed in front of the appropriately numbered street sign, holding or wearing things that related to the corresponding year in my life, and I would end up at home, aged 24. I thought it would be an amazing aid to memory, and I actually did make a chart of when things happened to me, and I collected some memorabilia from different years. (It was pretty easy for me to find at least one thing for each year from about 1991 until the present, but much harder to find things from before then.)
That project didn't work out, but I'm still interested in doing something like that. It frustrates me that it's already hard for me to keep a sense of perspective about when things happened to me (or, for that matter, when things happened in world history). Often, it's hard to remember how quickly and how dramatically my life has changed. Since the numbered streets in my immediate neighborhood go up to 26th Street, I still have one more chance to do this sort of project this year, although I'd have to keep going a block and a half or so past my house.
The advantage of this sort of exercise, including the task of physically walking through the city, is that it lets you associate things with a geography that's already familiar. For example, you could then think of an event in terms of a particular building, and see the approximate distance between things, or think about how long something lasted, in familiar spatial terms. I don't want to suggest that there is something more natural or easier about thinking in terms of space than in terms of time. But since memory can be so unreliable, or partial, or difficult, associating events of memory with the seemingly stable physical world helps put them in perspective in a way that could be more accessible.
The method of loci is a mnemonic technique in which items in a series are associated mentally with places along a familiar route. Doing this helps many people recall the series in order without as much risk of leaving something out or recalling things in the wrong order. For many people, it can be very helpful.
I think anyone who lives in a city with numbered streets has a ready-made framework for a surprisingly interesting and powerful personal art project.
