When my brothers and I were clearing out my parents' loft after they died we found a large beautiful African mud cloth. I did not have a specific memory of it, but my parents had instilled a love of the aesthetic of this fabric in my heart. My oldest brother fabricated one memory of the cloth while later I found a photo of my mother and toddler brother in New Jersey with the cloth hanging in the background. I sent a copy to my daughter who then made a painting of it which hangs in our house. The memory of the pattern, the looseness of the marks, and the mix of imagination and memory keep my hands feeling in the dark for the next photo.
"Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original... it is a continuing act of creation," pioneering researcher Rosalind Cartwright wrote in distilling the science of the unconscious mind.
"Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original... it is a continuing act of creation," pioneering researcher Rosalind Cartwright wrote in distilling the science of the unconscious mind.
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