I kept a
diary because of my “desire to keep records about a significant event” (Miller
in Rohan) A diary is something that can be so personal, and just as mentioned
in the article, it is a place to go back and remember the very things that made
one feel the way one does when it is especially good or disappointingly sad. I
have such memories, but did not write them down, and so now I must keep them in
my head and work hard not to forget them. I started a diary beginning with my
first child because the feelings that I had at that moment of her birth were so
electric that I couldn’t possibly imagine forgetting them, but yet I began to
realize how fleeting time was. Life became busy. It was so busy that each moment
with this new being was passing way too fast, and I couldn’t keep it all in. I
needed to remember it, that joy, that rush of emotion, but I was too tired. So I
began to write. I wrote and wrote so I would not forget day 1 and month 1 and
then month 2 and then her 6 month birthday. Then it was her 5th year
birthday. I stopped writing when she was three. I have the memories in my head
after that, but there are too many to enjoy. Then I thought I could gather all
of the sports t-shirts, or the different t-shirts she collected over the years,
because I could not give them away. I thought that I would make a quilt out of
the symbols on each of her t-shirts. I still want to do that.
Forget the diaries, the video camera began to replace my
need for words. Now I have the exact moment and motion pictures to remember all
of this by. Yes, markets have capitalized on my need to relish every growing
moment of my children. I did not want to lose any of it. So strong are these
emotions one has for a moment in time, that it creates the urgency to make a memory of
it. As the author writes, “Mamma’s belief that her clothing pieces memorialized
her life,” (Rohan, 372) makes it even more poignant for such memory making.
Also, at that time, the domestic lifestyle was women’s life as mentioned, “nineteenth-century
values within the middle-class feminine domestic sphere (372). Because of how
important this lifestyle was for girls and women, such production was
imperative for their identities. Without these precious devices of memory
making, identity could possibly be lost. Something so important to another
person becomes sacred to the one loved. Why let that be lost. Make it a memory
since we cannot hold onto life forever. Yes,
someone does capitalize on meaning-making but thank you for the opportunity to
have memories, my identity to live on.
It's interestign how technology seems to emphasize capturing a moment, an exact copy of the event. You bring up the video recorder as a logical extension of the diary, but the recorder does what words can't. It summons the movement and image as an exact representation allowing the moment to be re-lived. Which gets me thinking about the function and nature of memory, memory devices, and if the quilts we've read about do something very different because they aren't exact copies of events, rather a restaging in memory (of course, after they've been re-ordered and re-envisioned).
ReplyDeleteI love the tension you are seeing between modern, new technologies and a longing for and to capture the past. Is this because our technologies - and us by extension - change and evolve so quickly now that we want things to hold onto?
ReplyDeleteAlso, you might like a book called Assuming the Positions by Susan Miller and Buckner, Ott and Tucker's An Introduction to the History of Scrapbooks. They both talk about things like diaries and scrapbooks and the roles they have in our past, present and future lives.