At the time I was in Canada in the 1970s Margaret Atwood was the new star of Canadian literature. I had three of her books at the time, still have them, ‘Surfacing’, ‘The Edible Woman’ and ‘Lady Oracle’ and more. I even went to one of her lectures a few years later when she had a residency in Berlin at the Akademie der Kuenste.
Recently I was thinking about Memories and Time, don’t I always, when I remembered or saw something about it in the bookish part of Youtube, about the beginning of her novel, ‘Cat’s Eye’.
First Chapter, Part One
(My italics and Bold)
Time is not a line, but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once. It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his ravelling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn't understand what he meant, but maybe he didn't explain it very well. He was already moving away from the imprecision of words. But then I began to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of one another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. Atwood, Margaret, September,1988. Cat's Eye. McClelland and Stewart, Canada. pp. 420. The first two sentences are full of inferences, not fact, but I like the next bit. The part in Bold is exactly how I make my complex composites in Photoshop, a stack of layers (with selections and effects) that you look down through to view the image which is meant to convey the "Jumble of Memories" at a certain point in time. I make a series of a particular set of artefacts which evoke this jumble of memories and alter the filter effects and blending modes to suggest how the memories change with time. I wonder did I have this book in mind when I came up with this method? I doubt it, but you never know! I was really startled when I read this passage from Cat's Eye tonight. (I wonder if I can make the layers appear liquid and shimmer? I must have a wee think about that.) I wonder a lot.
