Photos: The preservation of a quickly fading memory

Before a human child becomes 5, many of the memories that occur become lost in the sea of their developing minds. As they are unable to consciously remember any of their memories, they look back wondering what actually happened. Even as adults, many memories become altered as time progresses, as the human mind continues to idealize the flawed event over and over again until it becomes something different entirely. This often occurs because the short term memory only has the capacity to hold 5-9 items at once and usually the long term memory will choose to remember only what doesn't distress the individual.

How could this be faked?

Thus, as a human tradition since the invention of the dagguerreotype, a primitive camera, photos have been used to preserve memories which can't be altered by one's own mind. Those, like Susan Sontag, who claim that "photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism... [and] never be ethical or political knowledge" (On Photography) are right about the former but false about the latter. They fail to see that the basic principle of photography is that even the idea of political and ethical knowledge is formed from the human definition of it, therefore it becomes sentimental. Not to mention the principle of naturalistic observation in psychology. The whole objective of photography is mainly determined from the "candid" and natural shots. On a darker note, even Susan Sontag can't claim that the reality of the shots taken during the Holocaust were just a semblance of reality. These photos can be alluded to a man sitting on a New York park bench taking photos of the people who pass him by on the street: no one knew that it was happening.



 Even family members who want to goad the most cheery of photos out of their children, will look back on these photos and remember that they had to do that, that their kids were not actually happy in that photo. For example, I distinctly remember instances of my mother indicating that I was actually sobbing in the moments before they forced me to smile in the photo. So in simple terms, photos become simply the guideline, the only way to characterize the little details that occurred that normally wouldn't be remembered.

The Social Construct of Food

Over the past three days, I experienced a wide variety of cultural environments in one compact town: Allendale, MI. These cultures, however, did not reflect the differences between race, but the differences of social constructs in relation to food. Through my extended time of competition I experienced vast changes in the perception of food during hotel breakfasts, college campus restaurant lunches, dinner buffets before laser tag, and fast food restaurants, and random late night carry outs.

As famous writer David Foster Wallace once quoted, "all the gourmet's extra attention and sensibility [is] just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory [pleasures]" (Consider the Lobster). This in fact is true of any location outside the home.

At hotel breakfasts, we paid little attention to the lacking appearance of the food and where it had previously been manufactured. The stress before competition dawned upon us and we scrambled to finish up the food we had and rush onto the bus. So we ate for the sake of it being free.

College Campus food- so delicious I felt a break from reality. Although I applaud the GVSU food services for making a food heaven, the experience didn't give me the chance to consider the effort the chef's had put in, or the transport of the goods to the table. It didn't make me question the morality of the situation, to eat the foods that others could not. It was purely an explosion of senses and one hour well spent.

The dinner buffets, the fast food restaurants, and the late night carry outs. Not about food at all. So yes, the pasta, ramen, and subs were good, but the whole experience came from the conversations not the food. Crowded into a booth at subway, a couch in a hotel room, or a table at the laser tag center, we had no interest in appreciating the food in a way other than what appealed to our gustatory pleasures. The social construct of food was clearly defined as a means to feel comfortable in a conversation, to mooch off of others, and to share whatever thoughts we had on the aesthetic pleasures of it.

Flowers: Different Meanings

Just about a month ago, many of us celebrated Valentine's day: a consumer driven holiday where flower shops and chocolate stores get immense revenue in one day's time. And in that one day, many parties are thrown and flowers are gifted without people recognizing these objects of love as anything more than that.

However, flowers can mean so much more than that. Typically, they are portrayed as an object of femininity; no one in their right mind would give a man flowers for valentine's day, right? However, society has begun to warp the idea of this feminine object into a symbol for different emotional states. For example, in the movie The Hours, flowers are used as a motif to signify different emotional states in each of the character's stories.

For Virginia Woolf, the flowers symbolize the solemnity of death. Because Virginia's life is so loud, so full of events, she finds happiness in the quiet things in the world. With the death of the bird, she takes pleasure in putting it to rest, placing roses at its grave. Her sister, Nessa, is the only one in woman in her story who doesnt wear flowers. The white dress she wears gives Virginia something to be attracted to, something that symbolizes a blank slate that Virginia desires, a trivial life with no distress.

For Clarissa Vaughn, these flowers symbolize domesticity. She proceeds through her daily life with flowers on her table, by planning parties that require flowers as centerpieces, and by bringing flowers to Richard's apartment on a regular basis.

Finally, for Laura Brown, these flowers fill the void between her own blank emotional state and the happy appearance she must display for her husband and family. The perfection of the flowers and the cake on her table connect her perfectionist yet emotionless personality with the false beauty of her household. 

The War Book, or the War Book?

If someone was going to tell me to read a book, I certainly was not going to pick up a book about some gruesome war. But hypothetically, say I had, twice; then which one would I say was better? The first, which goes by the name of The Things They Carried (by Tim O'Brien) , won a Pulitzer Prize for its "captivating account of the experiences of an infantry company in Vietnam...Evocative and haunting, the raw force of [a] confession" (says the Wall Street Journal). The second, called Mrs.Dalloway (by Virginia Woolf), "locates the enourmous within the everyday" (Michael Cunningham) and describes the homefront of an ending war.

However, Dalloway doesn't get praises for its exceedingly strong...war stories. Hidden within the thinly veiled quotes, Virginia Woolf threads "ideas" of the war into her tale with uses of words such as "boomed" (Woolf 5) and implications about a war veteran, Septimus, being diagnosed with PTSD. To put it frankly, this book is more about how time is paradoxical, being a crucial yet trivial part of our daily lives.

O'Brien, on the other hand, writes this story for the sole purpose of conveying the emotions from war to his audience. In fact, the major part of his story deals with the soldiers themselves, both in the war and after the war. For those who claim this story doesn't meld with the homefront as much as Mrs.Dalloway must reflect on how obvious the signals in Mrs.Dalloway are. O'Brien tells the reader upfront; this is exactly what they felt. It hits us with a frustrating anguish. However, Dalloway focuses on how the past influences the present, how little details from the war still exist in people's everyday lives. If not for the avid analysis, the message of war in Woolf's book could be belittled to a man who just has hallucinations caused by the disasters he has seen in the war.

So in the end, if I was actually going to pick up a war story just for the fun of it, I'd want to pick up one that told me upfront about the people who actually suffered, not the people who got the gentle after effects of those who had suffered.