In the coming weeks, the Miscellany will feature creative writing from students who went on the Summer 2015 “Ireland Through Writing and Literature” off-campus studies program. First up is a piece by Annemarie Eayrs ’17:
To Catch a Moment
“The eye has no corner, and the view has no straight edges like those of a photograph. The eye is not a camera, the eye of memory still less so.” Ciaran Carson’s ideas about memory came back to me as I stood inside a used shipping container parked in a Galway shipyard. The shipping container had been revamped into a makeshift art gallery for the Galway International Arts Festival and was now home to Russian artist Varvara Shavrova’s collection “Borders.” The longest border in the world—that between China and Russia—provided the inspiration for her collection, but Shavrova’s purpose in creating the works reached much farther. Through paintings, drawings, videos, and photographs, she examined the powers and constraints of both physical and cultural borders and delved into the truth of her own travels to Russian, England, Namibia, South Africa, China, and Ireland. Twenty-two of the abstract paintings and two of the video installments from the collection now resided in the old metal container parked beside a rusted mountain of scrap metal and marked only by the letters painted on the outside that read: The Shed.
The inside of the shipping container looked like an ordinary art gallery—its plain, white walls spotted with colorful canvases—unless you looked up. The ceiling had not been plastered over but left with its worn metal exposed. The paintings on each wall seemed to fill their carefully assigned spaces, and each had a thick, colored border at its top and bottom edge. A few paintings looked as if they had been smeared, with long lines and dabs of paint running from one side of the canvas to the opposite, a kind of internal border. Others seemed much more abstract with no discernable subject or figure. Some were straightforward paintings but of seemingly unremarkable subjects—strangers or soldiers or slow-moving rivers.
As I passed from one painting to the next, it struck me that, yes, this is how memory works. We do not remember in static images as much as in moments at the tipping point of change—the sight of a lone wolf poised at the edge of a boreal forest or a woman caught in the crowd before stepping onto a train. Scenes that, for no definable reason, go straight to the bone.
As I examined her paintings, I thought about my own travels. It has been nine years since I visited China for the first time, and only small pieces come to me when I attempt to call them back: a thirteen-course meal, a one-eyed man, a temple erected to the gods of good harvest, a rough ride in a taxi cab, a ruined pair of shoes. The memories return in disjointed pieces like shuffled scenes from a film, and I imagine that if I tried to document my memories from that trip, they would likely manifest themselves into something similar to the paintings by Shavrova—not renderings of tourist destinations or family but strangers and odd, poignant moments. It is strange what you remember and what you forget.
After looking at each painting, my friend and I slipped into the dark room tucked into the corner of the gallery where Shavrova’s videos played. The videos jumped from one shaky clip to the next in a jumbled stream. Some were accompanied by music—Russian orchestral pieces or Chinese folk tunes—and others played in silence or to the distant sound of churning water or the crunch of tires. Every so often, the camera would slow and I would feel a small wash of recognition as I identified a scene from one of her paintings—a rifle bouncing on a soldier’s back, a gaudy magazine cover, a man gazing out a train window, alone except for two bottles of water.
The clips were taken from Shavrova’s personal documentation of her travels in Asia, and they were far from grand, sweeping aerial shots of the landscape. Her unsteady hands made the camera wobble, and often Shavrova and her camera lens could be spotted in the shot. Yet the videos seemed more authentic because of this. She recognized the subjectivity of her experiences and incorporated that subjectivity into her art. As I watched her videos, it felt as if I were on the train with her, sliding past snow-crusted trees in Russia toward the next day or rumbling on an old bus into an empty Chinese village. The videos and paintings captured something more than just the subject matter; they captured the nature of memory as something fluid and deeply personal.
“The eye flits and flickers around all over the place, taking in bits of this and that, weaving in and out, picking, choosing, shuffling, negotiating, building up a picture that is never static, for everything moves through time and space. In fact,” Carson writes, “ordinary seeing is all memory, too.” As subjective as they are, stories capture the concrete: experiences, events, conversations. Memories are woven of something much less precise. Stories are for the sake of others; stories are to be told over a dinner table or around a campfire. Memories are for one’s own—to be kept in one’s pocket where the mind can run over it like fingers on a smooth stone.
During my first bus ride from the Shannon airport to the small coast village of Ballyvaughan, I pulled out my camera and did my best to capture the picturesque countryside as we cut our way through the rolling hills. The photos were all blurry, and I deleted them, unsatisfied. They were just flashes of green, already gone and marred with streaks and glares from the bus window. Now, I wish I had saved those photos or at least one of them. Maybe ten years from now, they would conjure up that bus ride, that struggle to catch the feeling of my first day in Ireland, and the excitement of it all. Maybe they would recall the experience of travel—the anticipation of going somewhere new tinged with the memory of what is being left behind.
Of my original nine weeks in Ireland, only two are left, and I cannot escape the feeling that I have let my days here slip past. Nine weeks in Ireland seem like a long time during the first week; looking back from the seventh week, less so. My picture taking and journaling slowed drastically with the promise of more days. Some afternoons, I forget what I ate for breakfast that morning, so how, I wonder, will I ever remember Dublin’s winding streets and pub songs and history? Will I remember the brown bread or Collins Barracks or O’Connell Street? What details might I forget a week after returning home? What trivial details might I remember years into my old age?
If I could paint, I would paint a picture of my trip to Ireland. The border would be green, of course. I would have to capture that splendid Irish green. Maybe I would paint the street performer with hair as red as the flames he swallowed. Or perhaps I would add a pigeon hunting for a victim on a crowed street in Galway or a full plate of fish and chips. I’m not sure what I would paint, to be honest. Nothing I can think of seems sufficient, but perhaps imperfect accounts of travel best capture our own imperfect perceptions.
I know that when I return home, my friends and family will ask me, “How was your trip?” Always eloquent, I will reply, “Good,” and maybe try and go from there. I will tell them about the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren and how scared I was to cross the street the first time. I will tell them about the bustling Dublin markets and how the River Liffey looked at sunset. I will try and recall all the names and the dates and the places. Stories, history, and landmarks are easy; memories prove much harder to relay. Those, I will keep to myself.