Letters, calendars, diaries and monuments are each vessels and vehicles for memory. I sometimes forget that to remember is a verb, a creative activity in the present tense, rather than a passive recall of static fact. Language also is a living thing- a cultural placeholder that reinvents itself constantly to include new variants of experience.
In acknowledgement of the fluid and complicated marriage of image and text, I have depended a lot on the wisdom given to me by the poets I have been honored to work with. Their attention to syncopation and pattern has been especially valuable. These lessons are factors in my frequent choice of the accordion format that I use for my books.
The accordion presents, in my opinion, a unique invitation to participate in the reveal and then reordering of a narrative. It behaves like a tiny model engine of how memory might work over time. Chronological panels can be moved to allow simultaneous openings of past and future scenes while the present always hovers as the viewers own invention. Like language, any and all versions stubbornly refuse permanence.
Mixing the world of the word with visual imagination is an open-ended conundrum. My notes below quote two influential thinkers on the subject;
