REFERENCE BACK by Philip Larkin
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.
The last paragraph is particularly poignant and can be linked to photography, and how many people would view photographs sadly, particularly family photos where many of the people may be dead.
'They link us to our losses; worse , They show us what we have as it once was.'
Photographs are essentially a still memory, but more than that; they evoke emotions of a time lost never to truly be relived except in the mostly unsatisfactory tomes of our memory.
I take a rather macabre view on memories, preferring instead to live in the present. Although memories can be a reminder of what shaped us and made us who we are today, they can also be shackles, fettering us to the past.
Despite this view, having no photographs of your life at all would be worse than the emotion one can feel looking at the past.
Humans tend to alter our own memories, we like the smudge the past, diminishing the bad so they become less painful and somehow the good times take on a golden light. We focus so heavily on those times sometimes that they become immaculate and somewhat better than they actually were. While this can still happen with photographs, as a photo is a reminder, a starting point from which we fill in the gaps with our memory; if your memory is skewed, so might the photo take on a different meaning.
However a photo can act as an anchoring point, a reminder of how things actually were , and sometimes rid us of the illusions of our own altered memories.
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