3 minute read. Content warning: None.
chatGPT Summary: Kay introduces a new July prompt focused on memory, exploring how different experiences shape individual perceptions and plans to respond to each question-based prompt throughout the month.
Vancouver, on occupied MST territory – We now move into July and a new theme. SC supplied this prompt, which contains a handful of question-based prompts, all on the subject of memory. Since receiving them, I’ve been reflecting on how I differ from the others in our trio, wondering how much of that is due to personality and how much is shaped by age.
Age, for me, is like a container—constant, defined, and linear, a measure that holds my experiences and the chances I’ve taken. However, I’ve known people who, despite aging, have avoided emotional growth, remaining as unremarkable as they were in their youth. Conversely, I’ve encountered young individuals who, despite their fewer years rotating the sun, possess a depth of knowledge and experience far beyond their age. While age is a shared experience, and as much as media and marketing sells us that we all follow a similar path, it’s a thin unifying thread. For me, each year is a finite container that I fill with the events and lessons of that time, only to box it up and place it on a shelf, ready to fill a new, empty container when the next year arrives.
I can’t wait to compare our responses.
Our July prompt follows:
Memory as a Holding Space and Vessel
Memory finds a place in objects. In intangible and tangible forms of “holding spaces” or “vessels”.
SC finds that “memory” can be directly tied to her own culture, triggered by food or even her grandparents’ boisterous laughter through the crowd. Whether it is the aroma of homecooked food that fills the room or the afternoon breeze drifting through the nature park, these memories find a place and reappear by triggers.
From an object in your household or your venture throughout the neighbourhood on your way home from work, what intangible or tangible object (like a small plant peeking out from an old tree root or the breath of silence on the sidewalk) rekindles an experience? (1)
Perhaps you want to create a new memory. What does that holding vessel look like for you? (2)
Like capturing an image, you capture a memory.
Is it a feeling or an emotion?
What do those memories feel and look like to you? (3 & 4)
We translate memory very differently since they shape who we are as individuals. At what point does this memory share a similar feeling or diverge away from one another? (5)
I have marked each of the specific questions with a number because I like each of them. While they are all part of the prompt, I have thoughts in response to each of the individual questions, and I want to take the first week to respond to them to see where they lead me. I am going to try and stay pretty shallow in the first week and then flow into deepers waters later in the month.
Technology note:
I continue to test the use of AI within my writing and artistic practice. I used chatGPT to create a summary for this blog, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.