Having been raised by a projectionist, I tend to love cinema. In fact, he (my father) told me recently that all those movies we watched together growing up were his school. He wanted to be able to talk about film to the people who came to watch them, he said.
So he studied them. We studied them. I studied them. And my young mind became a maze of images. Like how a baby puts everything in it’s mouth to ‘teach’ their tongue, I absorbed these pictures, moments, scenes until even books became movies. Dreams became like reality. I could close my eyes and still see.
I still can. This is one of the greatest and most pleasurable gifts I’ve received in this life: the ability to ‘see’ everything someone says like it’s a movie, and they’re the director. I watch 100s of films a day, just by listening. My own life moments become montage worthy–the simplest cup of coffee becoming a ‘flashback’ moment to every good warm cup before it.
And another thing:
I’ve discovered that, within the maze of these images, there is a structure by which I keep them all together. And this structure, to me, is a place. A place that I return to, again and again.
So as I always do, I started telling other people about this ‘place’ and what it looks like:
Basically, it’s a giant, endless grey space filled with fog. In perfect rows and columns as far as the eye can see in any direction, there are rectangle, stone monoliths rising up to the grey clouds above them. And whenever someone tells me a story – or I watch a film or short video, dream a dream, read a book – and it shifts something in me… one or two of the stone monoliths will start to move. Slowly. So slowly. With an echoing sound of stone against stone as a new idea, image, place, being, sense, emotion, becomes embedded in the core ‘memory’ of this place. My ‘mind’ map changes to encode the new information.
Which, is interesting enough in itself, but is also not why I sat down to write today.
Because what these conversations have always turned into is an exploration of other people’s mind maps. I’ll ask: what does yours look like?
And, low and behold, people have an answer.
This is how I’ve learned about the filing cabinets. The braille-books. The libraries, cathedrals, mazes, ant tunnels. It turns out a lot of us, when prompted, know exactly what our system looks like. Feels like. Sounds like. How it moves when new information comes in. Even those who have never thought about it before will start building it, then, in that moment of asking.
So today, I came here to leave you with this. As a prompt for thinking, writing, painting, photography, whatever your art is, I ask:
What does your place look like?
I’m talking about the place where epiphanies go to make their mark. Where your most brilliant self files things away. That place where new ideas become part of the schema. Even if you invent that place right now… I want to know: what does it look like?
I’ll be sharing any submitted art, writing, drawings, posts, or even comments that respond to this prompt in the body of this post – so don’t hesitate to share. I’ll even link it to your artist’s page or website!
Jessica Barratt 