Why? [Because] “Something that is loved is never lost.” ― Toni Morrison, Beloved
Digital Re-memory: “I Want to Go Home”
An Analogy of Dementia Through the Lens of Electronic Literature
The evolution of traditional print literature to our current state of electronic literature is not easily conceptualized. Though connected, the bridge between the two genres can be a hard toll to pay in understanding and acceptance. While all forms of electronic literature not born as such don’t qualify in the new discipline, for traditionalists, (an old folk like me), it’s difficult to accept the more common, easily accessible forms that do qualify especially when they can be categorized as social media, in the form of an app.
Underlying both genres is the foundation of language whose purpose is to communicate information and oftentimes a story. While the traditional American/Western intake of information follows the premise of left to right reading, with appropriate grammar placed to articulate pauses and stops, electronic literature similar to the DADA movement with their art of resistance, challenges these norms and interrupts the assumed unhindered progression of assimilating information and thought processes.
In electronic literature, connecting the dots is not obvious, but rather, will be indirect, incomplete tidbits of information that lead you, guide you and instigate you toward a conclusion. On the reader’s part, it requires a level of curiosity, and intentional work to come to the author’s intended/hopeful level of understanding. The disconnection that is evidenced in digital literature is reminiscent of the missed connections experienced in the lives of those experiencing Dementia.
The loss of memory and difficulty experienced in “connecting the dots” are no longer an unhindered progression of assimilating information and thought processes once relied upon before the onset of the disease. Likewise, the relationships of those connected to the Dementia patient can no longer rely on their assumed anchors in the patient’s memory as a means of comfort or consolation.
This project, Digital Re-Memory is to analogize my understanding of electronic literature in the light of experiencing my mother’s onset of Dementia. Electronic literature and my mom’s Dementia feels new, unpredictable, and scary and both are progressing faster than I’m able to get a grip on it.
My efforts in this endeavor are to creatively articulate my mom’s experiences of memory loss, from my point of view as a mother myself, a sister, and as my mom’s 9th child. I recognize this project is my way to memorialize her, this experience, and to cope with the pain of the anticipated loss of my mom and her impending loss of memory of me.
The title, Digital Re-memory is named such, in reference to the late Nobel Laureate and author Toni Morrison’s verbiage found in her novel, “Beloved”, which is what my mother is to me, my Beloved.
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Sethe: "It's so hard for me to believe in [time]. Some things go.
Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . .
But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone,
but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory,
but out there, in the world".
Denver: "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."
Sethe: "Nothing ever does."
Beloved pg. 36