Dislocation and Living Memory

While recovering from hardship I reflect upon a certain dislocation stemming from my recall of past events.  It is a situation where my concept of someone or something is interrupted by a lack or loss.  This kind of feeling is a bit like an empty space on a wall which used to hold a painting or a piece of furniture that was recently moved to reveal depressions in the carpet.  However, I have begun to realize that this dislocation is accompanied by what I have come to term living memories.

This phenomenon is different from dislocation in that the memories are tied to a real person that is still alive and acting autonomously.  I find that these two phenomena, dislocation and living memory, are often tied to one another when a living person’s absence has moved on to occupy another location.  In the course of living my life I have experienced these phenomena concurrently and am struck by how hard it can be to identify what exactly existed within these empty spaces.  I find this is made even harder when the artifacts to which these memories are tied are in flux or are absent as well.

I think that these phenomena pertain specifically to the process behind the documentation of infrastructure which I do both in my free time and professionally.  It is a process as marked by absence and confusion as it is by hard copies and facts.  I find that I am constantly asking myself how I know something is true or why something is the way it is.  What strikes me as most profound in all of this is in the way that I so often know nothing about the events that swirl about me.

I have concluded that documentation is essentially the contemplation of self.  In the process of deciding what is really going on around me both as an individual as well as a professional I am constantly confronting how little I actually know.  I have found that it is in this realization that I actually come to understand the phenomenon which I am studying.  Each element in any complex is often so unique in its function and use that a researcher can only arrive at understanding through an intimate examination.

I have learned that this process of understanding is incredibly dependent upon the researcher’s ability to stop focusing on the big picture since the nitty-gritty can be so complex.  Hence, one must not dwell too long on the scale or extent of, for instance, any particular databases primary key and instead dwell upon what events caused the primary key to come into existence in the first place.  Likewise, one must spend less time focusing on, say, one particular unit of measure since at any scale space or place may change the meaning of those units.

As our lives grow longer our personal relationships become more diffuse and complex

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 062914.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.