Memories can be fickle. We remember what we want to remember; we think we know the past, when in fact, we retain only that part that we find useful. In the process of remembering, we all too often sand off the rough edges of reality so that the pieces fit a desired context that has more to do with today than the past.
This statue of El Cid stands outside the former National Geographic Society headquarters in New York. It was crafted to remind future generations of a legend that exists mostly in our imagination. The sculptor had never have seen a likeness of the man. He had no idea of his true character or who he really was. What we are to remember here is not the man, but the legend attached to the man. The real El Cid fought for different masters in 11th-century Spain. At different times his opponents were both Muslim and Christian. According to legend, when El Cid was killed defending Valencia, his wife, Jimena, had his corpse outfitted in armor and lashed to the back of a horse for a final charge that won the battle, even if the war was lost. Eventually, the Moors were forced to leave during the Catholic reconquest of Spain. The memory of El Cid became a useful component of the collective cement that defines Spanish identity. Whether the legend as remembered is true or not, doesn’t really matter. It served its purpose which became the guarantor of its continued existence.
This photograph shows happy school boys leaving class to return home at the end of their day. The innocent laughter took place in 1970. The place is the open park in front of the presidential palace in Saigon, Vietnam. At the time, the war was still being fought, but in a few years, the US would withdraw its forces as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the palace gates, definitively erasing whatever remained of Vietnam’s colonial past. When that happened, Vietnam pivoted to a new era, which appeared to be modern, but in the end, was not all that different. At the moment this picture was taken, these boys were not thinking about that. To be honest, they probably had no thought of the future or the past. The photograph, then, is a snapshot of a moment of innocence that vanished as quickly and as suddenly as it appeared. Today, most of those who have survived are in their late fifties or early sixties. Their attitudes toward life today are probably quite different from the moment when this snapshot of innocence was taken. But the thing about memories is that they are always active in the mind of those who have lived them. A photograph may transport one back to a time when life seemed simpler, everyone was happy and there didn’t appear to be anything to worry about. But that is only a memory. A figment of imagination lingering in one’s mind.
This photograph was taken in a rural village in Northern India in the 1960s. At the time, I remember, donkey carts competing with automobiles in the heart of New Delhi. Not anymore. That era has long since gone. Only the photo remains as a snapshot in time. A memory of the past. I had visited this girl’s village briefly on an absurd errand. The place was so poor that no one could afford a statue of even one of India’s many gods. Instead, villagers meditated before an unadorned rock sheltered in a nearby stone hut that served as a makeshift temple. What is interesting in this photo is the girl’s expression. She is alert, questioning, and above all wary. Her grandfather may be holding the next generation in his arms, but the girl already knows that the future will very likely leave his generation behind. Restrained by basic poverty, she is still at the beginning of life when almost anything should seem possible. Still, one needs to choose carefully. That was in the 1960s, and the photograph is now nothing more than a memory of an earlier point in my life, when I was also much younger and quite different. The young girl is by now an old woman if she is still alive. I thought of her as a survivor, but I will never know what really happened to her, whether she succeeded or not. She is a memory fixed in my mind, a remnant of a time that is long since gone.
There was a time, early on, when I stopped in India every few months before traveling on to East Asia. When I could, I would take a trip to see the Taj Mahal, one of the world’s most exquisite buildings. Built in the 17th century by the Moghul emperor, Shah Jehan, the Taj was designed to ensure that the emperor’s wife, who had just died, should be remembered for all eternity. Today, no one knows who she really was, but the fact that she existed is indelibly marked in the world’s memory, thanks to the Taj.
The emperor’s wish may have been realized, but when I turned my head after looking at the Taj, I saw two small children playing in the grass. Surrounded by immense beauty, they possessed nothing, and very likely had no future. Unlike the emperor, his wife and the Taj, they were poor and consequently destined to be soon forgotten. That was more than a half-century ago. Like everything else, the photograph constitutes a snapshot of an instant in time memorialized only by a grainy photograph. Still, I found that I could not quite get them out of my mind.
