As I had to clean my hard drive yesterday once again, I was met with the same eternal question: what should be wiped out from it in order to obtain some space? A picture from a distant while ago, to be more precise, 6 years back from now and thousands of miles apart came back to my mind: our house in Hanger Lane (Anger Lane, as Eugeny put it once and for all bypassers by chopping off a letter in the beginning from a wooden sign in the street, or Hunger Lane as it will stay in my memories). One of my dearest friends, Massimo AKA Badile in a white doctor’s gown, sitting in a chair behind a desk in his improvised “office”, established in the midst of bunch of his clothes, toys and paints, between scattered pieces of paper, drawings, food wrappings, wirings, cables, books, cups, canvases, breakfast leftovers and various traces of our house pony Zak’s recent visit to his humble headquarters (this list can go on forever). Badile is in a good mood. He wears googles with spirals drawn on lenses today. He looks out of this world, and, indeed, he is. With his pineapple haircut freshly done and big smile on a face he asks me:
- What is necessary, Boris? - referring to this universe of things compromising his inhabitat. He is in the mood for cleaning.
_ What is necessary? - I ask this question myself yet once again, looking into the contents of my little, 15 by 5 inches silver treasure box: a case, in which we put generously donated by Apollo hard drive, which once belonged to our desk top, which we left behind when …it’s a very long story, which goes without end, as that kids’ poem about a house which Jack built. This little silver enclosure is my black box, similar to a black box they would recover after an airplane crash, as it contains more or less detailed account of my last 5 years of life.
I leave photos, texts, drawings and films aside, and flip through the contents of my music folder, compromising over 6o gig of memory.
A wife of my brother once complained about him: they wanted to clean their house, and he decided to start from dumping his old tapes. She found him 4 hours later in the garage, sitting in his car and listening to them on a car stereo. I know this feeling. Though some of tracks that this file contains were hardly played by me again since I put them there, I still wanted to keep them, as there were reasons for putting them there in the first place: most of them were my memories. And so I randomly played them one by one, as saying goodbye to my dear friends and moments we shared together before we depart forever.
Because I had moved a lot and often, there are very few things which stay with me long. Thinking about, only music does. As I think once again about all the possible ways to map our memories, I come up with a picture of a city, surrounded by terra incognita, which thorefore rather looks like an island with wide streets or rather streams of my life: Siberia (to which belongs and my hometown after we moved away; not in geopraphic, but in a practical sense, as it represents for me wast unknown void with few orientiers and few people living there: I succesfully secluded myself with chess and books in my room in my youth), Voronezh and my student years, Moscow, India, Moscow 2 (as it was an entirely different space inhabited by different people upon my coming back), London etc…
Little streets run left and right from those avenues, dividing those timestreams into little ones: as fish contains a backbone with smaller and yet smaller bones, my life or this memory map could be examined anatomically too.
Many of the names of that map would bear names of my favourite bands.
Maybe memory as a river would be a better example. It’s interesting to see how memory could be represented in all these different ways; let’s put random images of my liking I found in Internet together; you can replace the descriptive words with your own, if you like. I’d rather keep them unnamed, as they shift as the river does it’s bed from year to year:
As there are few ways to explore a landscape, I’ll switch from looking at imaginary memoryscape to its description: a bare name rarely means a thing. Referring to name of the place is alike referring to people. A while ago I’ve overheard a conversation between 2 girls on a bus:
1: Who was there?
2: A guy with a red hair; the guy in a black T-shirt who talks a lot and a silly one.
What a great description was it! It still stays in my mind though few years already passed, and I doubt if blank names would. So, returning to my memories connected with music: Continue reading ‘Memories’ potlatch’
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