Memories within

AG2021_1890170a
AG2021_1890171a

Zora Neale Hurston said, “Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” These “memories within” are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.

The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison
Untitled (Homage to Zora Neale Hurston, West King, St. Augustine), 2020.

AG2016_1020814a

AG2016_1020814a

Place marked with an impulse, found to be held within the fold (ii-iv).


… the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. – Popova

Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. – Walt Whitman

nature calls to something very deep in us. – Oliver Sacks

Brain Pickings