Memory is the constant, and is always there, even if it is an absence, or an uncertainty. Memory is the retelling of facts, a reference book entry -or to be more inaccurate given the unreliability of memory, a Wikipedia passage perhaps, complete with grammatical errors, point-of-view passages and edit-wars.
Resonance is rarer, shiftier, utterly inconsistent, and yet, paradoxically, more to be trusted because it is not about facts, about balancing the equations of what might or might not have happened six years ago. If memory is about the facts of what happened, then resonance is about the atmosphere of what was produced around those happenings.
The memories of a holiday six years ago may be summarised as follows:
Two weeks spent in a rented 17th century farmhouse in Scotland visiting various places; Loch Ness, where I used to live in Kinloss and Forres, Fort William, Cawdor Castle, Brodie Castle, Elgin, Randolph's Leap. Books I read there include 'It' (again) 'Our Lady of the Forest' 'Alien Animals' 'Scottish Ghost Stories'. 7/7 happened over those two weeks there, I bought 'We Live' by Electric Wizard, the second Witchcraft' album, Danzig's second album (again)...
This is the resonance;
(Out in the garden in the twilight-midnight of this far north)
-deep yellow, a falling, a green, a hallway, and the wind through the trees in the distance, sleeping and expecting, a glance struck in the corner of a room that was mahogany dark, the ether-ea of ghost stories, swept through fields of unnamed wheat, hidden rivers and the woods walked beside hiding inside their night-time, and other rivers, falling, and there is a light green too, Snickers Bars and cans of Guinness, 'Sunny Road' by Emiliana Torrini, the summer unfolding, threatening and promising to reveal itself, a pathway about to unwind under July to some shifting distance, on the corner of that field, a figure crouched over, untwining itself to be shadows and bark and twilight, the air new and ancient and intimate and strangely familiar, the creaking of a boat and drifting on memories that don't feel mine, crows and woods, and blue squares of night at the windows, a nocturnal shift and lake monster photographs that seem to hide themselves in empty cupboards and locked drawers, phantom Red-Setter dogs, and a fragment of being followed through these feather-light paths past too-deep weeds and woods and winds and a breeze through a 1930s mornings centuries before, vanishing into the sea, and the landscape here is secret and dangerous and beguiling, and this is the countryside where people might vanish-
But even that is not quite enough. Words fail, judder to a halt - like trying to paint a colour in black and white perhaps - but this monochrome colour-web catches more of a time than memory, on its own, can ever hope to do.
Is there resonance here now? -For that's the other thing about resonance, this essence of a time, distilled and purified, is never noticed at the time. It is only later; months, years, sometimes even decades, that resonance might make itself be known, if at all. Often a smell, more often a song, and we are back there, not only experiencing the time again, but knowing it, in a way that encapsulates, distills and purifies its very essence.
Resonance is a true sixth sense, an almost occult state that seems to warp concepts of linear time.
I wonder what resonance there may be now then, on this warm July night, after a spectral sunset, sat in my bedsit, listening to Emiliana Torrini's 'Fisherman's Woman' album, as I did in Scotland six years ago?
Resonance is a true sixth sense, an almost occult state that seems to warp concepts of linear time.
I wonder what resonance there may be now then, on this warm July night, after a spectral sunset, sat in my bedsit, listening to Emiliana Torrini's 'Fisherman's Woman' album, as I did in Scotland six years ago?
