Inner gaps of consciousness or forgotten memories.
Lost in time Mnemosyne, the Greek Titaness (from the Greek “to stretch, to extend, to spread forth”), mother of the nine muses, is said to have guarded a pool of water in Hades, that flowed from the river Lethe. As the dead drank from the pool, they would forget all that had ever happened to them before, ensuring a reincarnation free from the taints of their past life.
Initiates could then drink from the river Mnemosyne which would help them to remember all that was about to pass in their future life. This strange relationship that memory has with time and experience is something that stretches at the limits of our consciousness. We struggle through our life trying to capture what is important and relevant as it flows past us in a torrent of conscious and unconscious experience, fishing for the moment and cultivating attention in repetition, only to we find ourselves sleeping again, swimming in the waters of oneiric space with the vestiges of the remembered and the forgotten floating into our minds and out again, regurgitated and transformed. This is where we find ourselves, in the flickering space between remembering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, between what has already happened and what is about to occur. This space is the present yet finding our way there and holding ourselves in it is an enormous and difficult task. It would seem that if we try too hard to be totally aware, we can’t, but if we try not to try, it’s no better.
Filmed on location, edited by Jacqui Devenney Reed
