I have written at length here about the influence of Joan Didion in my life and particularly this quote of hers:

"I write in order to find out what I am thinking."

But of late I have discovered through my use of my Epson V700 Photo flatbed scanner that there is another way besides in my writing.

Since 2001 I have been scanning the flowers (many roses) and plants from our garden. The idea was to record at 100% size an accurate representation of the plant. I may have now 3000 of these. When some of my roses would die I felt that in some way my scan of them meant that my memory of them was almost like having them in actual fact in my garden.

In the last few years I have been placing objects (not only negative, slides and photographs) on my scanner and using it as a table top photograph ( a term from that last century).

But today, 26 April, 2024 as I was on my bed getting ready to turn off the lights I came to this idea that my scanner is somehow ordering my thoughts.

This scan is all about the fact that I am an Argentine. In it there is my father’s 1930 mate with its bombilla, my father’s Argentine flag, my Argentine identity document when I left Buenos Aires for Mexico City in 1953, my Argentine draft document, my portrait in my winter Argentine Navy uniform (taken by my friend John Sullivan) and finally the facón (gaucho knife) given to me by my navy pals when they knew I was going to return to Mexico where my mother lived in Veracruz.

So in one scan an almost whole memory of my time in Argentina in a neat package. I can now go to sleep having found out how I think.

1951 - Susan Stone right, Alex left with gun

Rosemary & Niño - 3 March 2020

When I was 8 I was interested in girls without knowing exactly why. There was a girl in school I especially liked called Susan Stone. Her father was the general manager of General Motors Argentina. He would send a Cadillac to pick me up to take me to their spacious mansion so that I could play with his daughter. It was there where I saw my first television set.

At night I would turn off my lights with the intention of thinking about Susan. Since the idea of sex or anything related to a woman was not in my imagination my thoughts involved nebulous ideas of sitting next to her and watching her smile at me.

Now if you get into bed with the idea of thinking about someone (I do this daily in relation to my Rosemary) what is it called? It cannot be a daydream? Thoughts that come to your head as you are about to sleep what are they called?

My Rosemary often told me that I lived in the past. Consider being a man in a family and you are an engineer and not a photographer. What are your memories? Borges often said that in order to remember you have to first forget.

In my case I am surrounded by framed portraits of my family and of my past life. I have thousands of negatives and slides of all that. I am constantly finding negatives of Rosemary and our daughters that I have almost no memory of having taken. When I see these what do you call what you might remember about them?

As I see it I have memories (memories that I can urge myself to go back to) and I have the memories of looking at photographs and remembering (or not) when I took them and the circumstances.

The term photographic memory is used to signify a very good memory.  Somehow I have another version of this that I would also call a photographic memory.

How does this photographic memory of mine affect my daily life?

I turn off the light. The cats get close to me. I notice the empty spot on my right on the bed. I don’t have to force myself to remember how it was when Rosemary was alive and there. I can remember that she never snored and slept with her back to me. I can reveal that all I had to do was to touch her back and she would know what it was that wanted and she would pull up her nightie. I can remember that a few months before she died I would also turn my back to her and I would cry (doing my best, but failing, that she would not hear me).

As her death on December 9 2020 recedes, ever so slightly from my memory, I can remember her voice well.

But I want to end this by asking myself that when I turn off the lights and immediately begin to think of her, what is this kind of memory called? Is it any different from turning off the lights, so many years ago, to think about Susan Stone?

Memories happen without control. But what of memories that one pushes to remember? Is there a difference with a random memory and one that comes from looking at a photograph that I took that is on my bedroom wall?

It would seem that the concept of memory is complex.

Hosta 'Autumn Frost' 25 April 2024

Pristine

Mid 16th century (in the sense ‘original, former, primitive and undeveloped’): from Latin pristinus ‘former’. The senses, ‘unspoilt’ and ‘spotless’, date from the 1920s.

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Since I can remember, just-bought new shoes, would invariably, in short order, be stepped on by someone or some other way there would be a nasty mark on its pristine surface. Nothing remains new for long.

Inevitably, a new car, with its special brand-new smell will get a dent. That is the way for anything. That crying baby just out of the womb will soon show the flaws of aging.

To see something that is flawless and pristine is an experience that one remembers as a “first time”.

And so now in my Kitsilano deck garden my potted hostas have that refreshing, bright (I will run out of adjectives her) pristine look. They are unspoiled. They are yet to be bleached by bright sun or get holes from nasty looking (even pristine ones now in early spring) slugs.

At the same time, while many who buy and collect antique cars and restore them to perfection, might not understand the beauty of the obviously not new. That is the case of the used Pentax S3 I purchased at Foto Rudiger, on Venustiano Carranza Street, in Mexico City in 1962. Even then the black paint coating had begun to rub off and the brass beneath could be seen.

There are many photographers who have been known to attempt to age their black-painted film cameras. When my fellow photographers see my Pentax they invariably smile and tell me how beautiful it is.

Is there something of this when we look at people? When I first spotted my Rosemary from the back walking outside the school where I was working (I did not know she worked there also) and saw her lovely straight hair, that very short dark blue mini-skirt and those legs, and those legs! I was dazzled.

Then when 2020 came around when she would get up from our bed I did not notice how gravity had affected her body. Why?

Because she was like my Pentax S3. She was lovely.

This blog is the second one that represents and essay that I will tape in back of the framed inkjet print of Rosemary and Alexandra (1969) done as a chlorophyllograph. My North Vancouver photographer Ralph Rinke inspired and taught me to do a b+w inkjet transparency and to mount it on a hosta leaf in summer sun. The leaf is tightly clamped between a backing and glass. I left this one four hours in the sun. The chlorophyll and the sun left the image. Rinke believes that even in protection from sunlight in a home, the image begins to fade. Thus I placed the hosta leaf ( Hosta ‘Paul’s Glory’) on my mother’s red Mexican rebozo. Rosemary and I used to go to a nearby store called Hob where they had quality used stuff. It was there where be bought this frame (cheap it was) and many more. Of late I am trying to use them all up. My daughters will either have to quietly decide who gets what or…. I hope they don’t fight over them.

Because this is a chlorophyll print, I call it a chlorophyllograph which makes me a chlorophylographer.

Niña & Niño

Every day seems to be much like the day before these days.

Rosemary and I used to enjoy our breakfast in bed and we often told each other that it was the best moment of the day. When I go up the stairs with my breakfast tray I know that within minutes Niña will come in from the garden followed by Niño about 30 minutes later. They just want to be with me all the time. And it is the best moment of the day.

I look at them and I glory at how graceful they lie and sleep and how they stare at me without blinking. Then the three of us settle down, I remove my glasses and we fall asleep for a nap. Niño is on my right side and my hand is on him. Niña is between my legs.

That it is the routine every day. By the afternoon, weather permitting, Niño and I walk around the block using Rosemary’s route. I feel the presence of something, someone. I don’t believe in ghosts but then?

I have been thinking about all the above and particularly the Niño walk and bed with the two cats.

She is not there. But it seems that by not being there she is there. As I walk Niño that non-presence of Rosemary is ever-present. Is she there by not being there?

There is that old dictum that, “Absence makes the heart fonder”.

With that feeling in me, I look at my cats and it seems that the three of us are sharing that ever-present non-presence which is a presence in itself. What do they know that I don’t know? Is this why they are increasingly more affectionate?

When I open the closet I can see Rosemary’s shoes neatly arrayed. Her feet were in them. When I look at the cats I know she stroked them. Is this more of a connection than her lovely shoes?

Joan Didion & her husband's shoes