misty walk along the beach
Jude Marion
A few days ago I heard a talk by award-winning scientist Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, whose controversial research explores the cognitive mechanisms of memory, its reliability, and the ways a memory can be manipulated or implanted. If you’ll pardon my inelegant summary, Loftus has spent decades demonstrating that the mind is a fallible thing, and that claims of recovered memory — which can change the course of people’s lives, for better and worse — are well worth re-examining.
As I look at this wonderful picture, I’m struck by its familiarity, as though it’s a moment from a day I’d simply forgotten — even though I’d never seen it before I chose it from the Utata pool for this post. It’s a testament to my own fallibility that I can almost “remember” standing there. I can practically sense the sand pulling lightly at my shoes, and the damp fog against the skin of my face. The figure walking toward me seems like someone I’ve hugged before.
What does this tell me? It certainly speaks highly of the photographer, who has invited me into a slow-shuttered moment that might have been private at the time, but evokes something so universal that it feels like I could have been on that beach myself. And it reaffirms my own sense of longing, as I paw through the debris of my own decades. I have no personal recollection of a little dog like this one rushing to greet me at the foggy seaside. But I’ll gladly borrow this shared memory, so I can return to the touch of wet sand in tousled fur. In a lonely moment I’ll return to it like it’s a print I’ve pulled tenderly from a scrapbook, with my fingertips careful along its yellowed edges.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Jenn Wilson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
