! The First Photo That Memory Took

that moment when … when memory first opened its treasured album and began to make our picture of ourselves - it belongs to all of us, to each of us. it’s where each meets all, and all meets each; more of ourselves than we have ever stopped to analyze: that blurred, out-of-focus moment – was it the pattern on the hood of our pram, the strap around our kiddicart, the turn of the stair, the pattern of the bricks around the fountain in the park, the memory of our first fall; the lion’s head fountain on the wall? was it not a person, of those who peered into our cot, or lifted us, simply because we could already control those beings around us with a dribbly smile, a vague wave of our hand? was it the first thing that we remember because it paid no attention to ourself, but simply, was… was, outside our favoured world? whether we ever open the album, or do not, it sits there, unexplained, holding some secret of a consciousness beyond the theories of scientists and philosophers; inevitably, ours to be followed – some years after – and this, we may deny at first – by that moment of a further consciousness: when - as equally mysterious, unforgettable, and often unremembered to this day - we knew that we knew something but did not know what it was we knew.