My Facebook memories just reminded me that 5 years ago, I posted about my ricordanze on Instagram:
During lockdown, I wrote every day in a spiral notebook about what was happening and how I felt about it. Lately, I have been thinking about starting another ricordanze. In truth, I should have started weeks ago. But, better late than never.
With the fifth anniversary of the covid shutdown looming, I have been thinking a lot about Boccaccio, the Decameron, which I recently bought on audiobook, and what it means to remember. Today, we had the St. Patrick’s Day parade on the Parkway. Five years ago, we canceled that parade “out of an abundance of caution.” The Mutter Museum had recently opened an exhibit about the 1918 flu pandemic, which discussed how a parade in Philly had spread death. So, the health department canceled the parade. This weekend, the Mutter opened a new exhibit called Trusted Messengers: Community, Confidence, and COVID-19 Early Access to commemorate the beginning of the pandemic.
We’ve lost many things since the beginning of the pandemic—our memories perhaps most of all. As Kate Cohen noted in the Washington Post this week, “the pandemic altered our sense of time, which has in turn warped our memory.” One study called this a “temporal rift.”
Part of that memory rift involves a misremembering. Often deliberately reshaping our memories to smooth over the rough patches of trauma and grief. This afternoon, I was listening to Let This Radicalize You, where the authors mention the lack of public rituals acknowledging the grief and ongoing trauma.
To record, to archive, to remember, and even to imagine. These acts are more important now than ever.
I haven’t decided if I will keep these memories on the blog or move them to an email newsletter. I’m not sure if I want all these posts available to everyone. I could create a subscriber only content on the website or move them to an email newsletter. What do you think?
I think a newsletter would be most appropriate. You can make them public at a later date if you feel that’s the right thing to do. You could even make selective writings public that way.
This is what I am thinking too. Maybe 1 update a month goes on the blog.