Longing to the forgotten places
Forgotten space means to be remembered. Maybe it is more memorable because it takes effort to remember.
And now I am anxious, since I am struggling with recollecting this space of my childhood and upbringing. I am longing to Hanoi, to its streets at night, to smell heady scent of the Saton – the famous evergreen tropical tree that defines Hanoi’s autumn. I tend to forget that smell now.
The memory of the place is immense and its components so well connected so that if an experience is not strong enough, it tends to be forgotten all at once. How to simulate the materiality of the past, the smell of the Saton trees, the sudden moist air that cut into the bones at the beginning of Autumn, the lofty street light that fall through the old trees around the central lake, or the sound of the night snack vendors, always on their bikes, intersecting the neighborhood’s small streets and alleys?
This longing grows stronger and stronger as I am more and more hopeless. There are no childhood friends who tell me the old stories. There is no high trees in the street, or a night tea shop in the pavement that I can take refuge in. The only medium I have now is the night, where reality is becoming less distinctive, and the perfect silence begins to open the door to memory, for the silence of present resembles the ones in the past. But I need a trigger, even a most tiny piece of memory so that I could come back to that space. I remember many things, but they are all facts which are detached from sensation.
At least the night gives me the needed tiredness so that reasons would take too much energy to function, and for that reason I hope the memory of my childhood place would fill in. Longing to a place is a desperate attempt of seeking and recollecting the substances of the past, which are not there. Perhaps longing to a forgotten place is strongest when remembering becomes such a painful process.
Forgotten space should be exactly poetic space. Hanoi, for many reasons, becomes more Hanoi throught the eyes of the artist.
– Tuan Manh Nguyen