Purify Emancipate Create

I actively sincerely severely and acutely distrust memory. 

Which came first - my distrust or my terrible memory - more than likely doesn't matter. I don't trust my memory, and I don't trust yours. If details have been written down, photographed, recorded or otherwise "laid as proof," I distrust memory of those events all the more. When faced with evidence of the plot of my life, I can often feel my memory squeeze out material that doesn't adhere or, more often, carve a space into an area otherwise whole and then refer to that hole as an unchosen lack. Paraphenalia lacks context and feeling; it is, solely, a document, and it is therefore an object upon which any subjective view can be projected. 

Photographs are merely screens? I say this as a photographer? 

To be honest, I think I say this because I am a photographer.

I don't consider myself cynical or overwhelmed with facts or sensory information; nonetheless, I doubt (especially) my own stories, (especially) the ones I tell and retell to myself and to you, because (as Grace Paley wrote), 'Any story told twice is fiction.' 

This gives a dire impression of me, I'm afraid, and worse, it's one with which I can't argue. I'm not saying Events Did Not Take Place; I'm saying that my description of events leaves out context and mixes up specifics the way forgetting egg in a recipe changes the taste, texture and wholeness of a cake. 

Does this mean I refuse to remember? Or that I refuse to retell? 

That I cannot share because the fear of my own false memory grandstands me?

Sometimes.

(I expected to write another answer, but my fingers overtyped me.)

I don't consider it bad to distrust the self. I make mistakes all the time, I catch people in mistakes all the time. We lie, to ourselves in abundance if the need arises, and to one another with the best of intent. We leave out stories that fill in blanks that reverse and redirect the same stories.  I do this because I'm creating a pattern, a set of multi-faceted answers to a book of questions someone reads to me in my dreams/past/childhood/meditations. I don't know why I'm inaccurate. Maybe there's not a reason aside from basic human inaccuracy. But maybe there is. It's silly, sentimental and far too problematic for me to decide if it's good or bad; I can only live with it, push through it, try to form clay out of the sky, the sun and the ashes.

Likewise, I don't trust photography. I find it manipulates me as if it were the companion of memory, as if it were connected less to my finger and more to a benevolent puppetmaster buried inside me -- and she uses my creative body and my imagination like a sieve.

Days after I've made an image - if I'm lucky - I realize why I've made it. It's not always a negative realization, but it sometimes is. Who wants to repeat their wound in a new and more colorful format? Who wants to still carry a wound in general? Don't the places we've been hurt -- all of us -- eventually cancel one another out? 

I'm in love with the way we're structured to forget. It is both armor and privacy fence.
Submarine with firearms and sailboat with wine and cheee.

I want to place these structures tête-à-tête. 

Want to unfold the body of my own memory like a placemat. 

Want to see how it fits on this, my only and dearest worktable. 

Photographs taken exactly one week apart, almost to the hour.

Under the pretense of purifying, emancipating, or merely creating identity,

memories inevitably support some secret tendency to repeat and reenact.

- Peter Sloterdijk in Rage and Time