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Sunday, September 29, 2013

September 29. Day 272. Smashing it

Memory is a strange thing. The brain's ability to decide what things are retained and what things are lost sometimes seems quite arbitrary and often unrelated to the impact the event had at the time.
Sometimes you can remember a snippet of a conversation that happened 40 years ago but not one that happened yesterday.
Even though they happened 30 years ago I remember much about the university years but almost none of it relates to a single thing that happened in a lecture room or tutorial.
But there are exceptions. I remember day one and the instruction to look at the person to your left and to your right. We were told only one of the three of us would graduate. How to win friends and influence people.
I remember the lecturer in photography who most weeks would come in and pull great lengths of film out of canisters and then warn us not to do the same. Ever.
And for some reason I remember an image he showed us of a hammer about to smash an egg. I even remember how it was done. Remember those were the days of SLR cameras without a D in front of the name. The plan was to take an image of a hammer resting on an egg. Roll the film back a frame and repeat pulling the hammer away causing a motion blur. It was a little bit like what I recreated today only the original was much, much better. For some reason that has made a hammer sized impression on my memory while much around it has proven to be as fragile as egg shells. I refuse to believe this has anything to do with the partying of the university years. That's just the way memory is. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Take to it with a hammer if you must.

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