I’ve just been reading an excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s ‘Bluets’. She mentions that on her cv she states that she’s currently writing a book about the colour blue. But this is not exactly true as, despite saying this for years, she hasn’t written a word. 

I have never had the imagination - or the necessity - to make something up on my cv.

I’m thinking about the act of curating.
Curating my life.
Deciding what is important one day, in one context, but may not be in the next. 
How I may choose to share one aspect of my life with one person 
and a totally different aspect with another. 

Fragmenting myself, my experiences, my story.

As I get older I find I am returning more to childhood memories.
Or is that really true?                                                         
Maybe it’s not linked to age. 
Maybe it’s linked to losing my mother two years ago?

The need to Interrogate aspects of my childhood, her history, our history together. 

Reading her old journals, questioning how much they are connected to truth,
how much of her own curation was happening within those pages. 
Whether that matters?

If I were to start throwing away my journals, notebooks, sketchbooks, 
then surely I would be selecting the aspects of my life           
my thoughts, my preoccupations that I felt were more important 
more shareable, more digestible.

When my mum died there were a number of her belongings that I really wanted to keep. 
A beautiful, old, very large apothecary jar made from blue and white china. It sits on the top bookshelf in our front room and gives me great pleasure. My daughter keeps asking if there’s someone’s ashes in there.

I also inherited a wooden spoon rack that holds at least a dozen wooden spoons of various shapes and sizes. In the two years since it was installed on the kitchen wall I have used two spoons. Every day when I look across the table at them they give me great joy.

I am currently doing some online coaching training. Each Saturday we are asked to watch an hour long video. This weekend there was a visualisation exercise that involved looking at a photograph of yourself as a child. I used the same photograph, browned at the edges, curled on each corner. I’m about six years old, my brother is three. The look of sheer joy on our young faces with him clinging tightly to my old duffel coat, his feet only just off the ground. My very first bike. Stabiliser-free, painted red and blue with small white rubber tyres.

The exercise was intended to celebrate myself as a child, recognise my true essence.

The instruction was then to look at my own reflection in a mirror, imagine that child within me, recognise that true essence is still present.

I had no problem with this. I’m a pretty positive soul.

It is strange that I am drawn to your use of the word punctum.

In looking up its meaning I discover that it was a term used by Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher and semiotician that I studied as part of my degree when I was twenty one.

I struggled with his writing.

His language was dense, his theories complex but fundamental.

You describe the word in relation to time: looking through the eye of a needle - definitely something to do with piercing, or being pierced.

For Barthes punctum is not specifically linked to time but refers to ‘an incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph which ‘pierces’ or ‘pricks’ a particular viewer, constituting a private meaning unrelated to any cultural code.’

Without your definition I would not have thought of punctum in relation to time.

I’m now imagining the abandoned photographic slides that I picked up from the street recently. I was ‘pricked’ by their function as container of memory.

Of a moment, a place, a person, a time             
that I had never experienced.

I find I have come full circle.
Returning to the concept of throwing away aspects of my past.

 Discarded photographs embody a sense of loss,
of absence, of grief.

 What if,
in letting go,
I inadvertently create a burden for someone 
who may stumble
across a fragment
of my rejected past?

Is that even a necessary consideration?