Between the Lines
I returned from Japan over a year ago now, and in that time had a baby! I was four months pregnant during my travels, which was quite possibly the perfect timing because I was starving (so much katsudon and Hokkaido ice cream to be had) and still energetic enough to walk 5-6 miles a day. That month feels very far away right now as my daily routine is dictated by diaper changes and nap schedules rather than Shinkansen times and my own spontaneous whims, but I’m finding little windows of time to return to my travels in anticipation of an exhibition this coming March.
The further I get from the trip, the more I’m reminded of how malleable memory is, how it warps and shifts over time, and how much my drawings from that time have shaped what experiences I hold on to still. To the outside viewer, these drawings act as representations of the sites I visited; memorials and gardens, stones and trees, sacred temples and makeshift shrines. For myself, these drawings say so much more, between and beyond the lines, about my own memories and experiences. Between the lines, I’m reminded of the cat that followed me around Kawai Kanjiro’s house and the Swedish couple I spoke with about ceramics; of the fear that I had gotten lost on the way to Hompuku-ji and the enormous relief when the temple appeared out of rice paddy fields; the humor and generosity of a couple leaning over in their seats so I could take a picture of the sun setting on Mount Miune on a train ride back to Nara; of my first day in Tokyo walking through Yasuda Garden fighting every urge to go back to sleep, and finding at every turn more excuses to stay awake as long as possible.
Said cat at KawaI Kanjiro’s house
Drawing is inherently a subjective act. Not only do drawings represent the priorities of its maker (what is shown and what isn’t), but they are ultimately interpretations of place. “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible,” goes the Paul Klee adage. In the instance of my travels, making visible was a translation of memories, nine vignettes at each site visited, drawn quickly and with pencil or ink, occasionally water colored later if the colors were important. It was a system developed for myself so that I could experience and remember simultaneously. Drawings make memorial a place that no longer exists, landscapes made manifest only for that moment in time and rendered now somewhere between the lines and reality.
On a long train ride back from Ise Jingu to our ryokan in Nara (the aforementioned train photos of Mt. Miune), I hurriedly sketched into the grid of nine squares that were intended to represent the day’s long visit. I didn’t typically sketch after the fact, but Ise was a particularly sacred place—an expansive city, like the Vatican of Shintoism, with 125 shrines throughout. It was also the Niinamesai holiday, a celebration of the rice harvest, and people had traveled from all over to witness the procession of rice sent by the emperor to be delivered to the temple. I already stood out as one of perhaps two people I noted who were not Japanese pilgrims there for the ceremonies, so I kept my drawing supplies in my bag out of respect and a little embarrassment. The shrines, it was also clearly noted in a universal pictographic camera with an X through it, were not to be photographed. And so, back on the train, I began to jot as quickly as I could, the 9 clearest memories I held on to from the day.
“Think of memory more like a painting than a photograph.”[1] That according to the professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis, Charan Ranganath, who studies the neurocognitive structure of human memory. Memory is always seen through the “lens of interpretation and imagination”—all blurred edges and collaged fragments. The artist John Berger reflected on this quite similarly, though from the vantage of art rather than science. “Isn’t a drawing the polar opposite of a photo? The latter stops time, arrests it; whereas a drawing flows with it. Could we think of drawings as eddies on the surface of the stream of time?” [2]
“Think of memory more like a painting than a photograph.”
It’s interesting to think of the photograph as drawing’s opposite, especially given its ubiquity in this century as the medium through which we attempt to hold on to memories. This ubiquity is perhaps part of its deficiency as a medium for memory, with hundreds, thousands, of images accumulating on our phones over time, the sheer volume rendering them almost meaningless. Ranganath says that meaning is inextricably linked with memory and this meaning is what separates objective, “semantic” reality from our memory of lived experience. “We’re capable of remembering things in extraordinary detail, but we infuse meaning into what we remember. We’re designed to extract meaning from the past, and that meaning should have truth in it. But it also has knowledge and imagination and, sometimes, wisdom.”[3] The leap from truth or fact to a full and textured memory is through meaning.
I’ve been a bit obsessed with the notion of memory for…as long as I can remember – ha ha – in part because my own memory is so bad. This desperation to grasp onto fragments of my life is especially true now as a new parent, as my own sleeplessness colludes with the endless cute and remarkable things my daughter does to render me totally amnesic. I’m reminded lately of the Banksy documentary, Exit Through the Giftshop, in which the artist (Mr. Brainwashed) turned-subject turned-artist again obsessively records his every experience following graffiti artists in 1990’s LA, boxes upon boxes of VHS filling up his apartment; a physical catalog of memories as an expression of the limitations of memory-keeping. In addition to the 9,000+ photos I’ve taken since I became a parent, I have also kept a sketchbook that takes some of the few fragments of this time I most want to retain, evolving in my mind as time passes, a ‘memory of memory’. [4] Which is to say that the reverberations and fragments of memories we hold on to, especially those archived by drawings, take on a life and a truth of their own.
A fraction of the 9,000+ photographs I’ve taken this year
Memories of this same time period, through drawing, a ‘memory of memory’
The leap from truth or fact to a full and textured memory is through meaning.
The two largest shrines at Ise, known as Naiku and Geku, are the main destinations of the scared city and have stood each in the same alternating footprint for roughly 2,000 years and 1,500 years respectively. Inherent to these two structures is their cycle of rebirth—every twenty years they are rebuilt, the Shikenen Sengu ceremony, in a cycle that has been repeated over 60 times across millennia. Sitting next to each temple are the traces of the previous structures, and the footprint of the future temple, a poetic ritual, like pouring water back and forth between two glasses. The reconstruction is also a passing down of the knowledge of building technique, the twenty years being an intentionally human length of time to pass institutional memory, an institution of craft, materials, and ritual that has been effective enough to persist since 690 AD.
Photo of the Shikinen Sengu process, source: https://th-architect.com/2013/10/on-shikinen-sengu/
This site—and the cultural practices intertwined with it—manifests so much of the notion of ‘sites of memory’ that guided my interest for this trip and what I plan to digest more in a future blog post and at my exhibition in March (!), but it also reflects how I see drawing as an interpreter of memory, like a game of telephone played with oneself where the present, past, and future coincide.
[1] From the New York Times interview “A Leading Memory Researcher Explains How to Make Precious Moments Last” with Charan Ranganath; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/04/magazine/charan-ranganath-interview.html
[2] A quote from John Berger as noted in the book “Seeing Through Drawing: The Celebration of John Berger”
[3] Ranganath
[4] From Sebastien Marots essays “Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory” which really eloquently explore the garden and the city as spatial/physical/temporal artifacts of memory.