Do you remember that singular time we organized a Milonga del Arrabal in 2011? We held it inside an abandoned antiques shop a half hour outside of Charlotte that a friend of a friend was leasing from the owner as a place to keep his art projects. All the antiques were still in it and we arranged them to create a lovely dance space and everyone came? People from Augusta and from Charlotte and from Columbia and from Durham showed up.
We strung fairy lights and lit a few oil lamps on the snack table, turned on some mid-century modern style floor lamps, stacked side tables to hold pastel colored table lamps from someone’s grandma’s 1980s living room, arranged random doctors office chairs, wooden school desks, an old massage or physical therapy table that was lowered all the way for people to sit on.
A picture I took that night ended up being the cover of another friend’s book of poems (search for my name on Amazon and you’ll find it - be a cool friend and order yourself a copy, maybe he will send me xmas cookies this year).
I think they put me in charge of the music and I had zero clue what I was doing but from the pictures I just found this morning it still looks like people were having a good time! I could be wrong about this because we had done another one in January after a snow day had cancelled the Monday night practica and that might have been when they made the mistake of putting someone who couldn’t hear music at this point in her emotional life in charge of the music. The pictures I saw this morning had people in short sleeves. I think we maybe had our other friend do the music at this version.
If I was the person in charge of the music I am embarrassed and I apologize. I had only been dancing for two years and would not learn how to hear tango music for another eight. I’m glad my memory is foggy here though; all I remember is what a fun time we all had.
It’s just that olvido1 is a kind and cruel feature of being human. Kind because when your heart gets broken, given enough time and distance, after a while you may no longer remember the name of the person who broke it, nor how it felt. Cruel because without remembering regularly, memories like these of the Milonga del Arrabal would be lost as well after enough time.
Which naturally brings me back to the theme of this entire newsletter, being what happens when you delete your Facebook account? One thing I no longer have is access to picture albums of events I’ve attended. On the one hand, if I don’t talk to anyone about that night (or stumble upon an old google drive folder), naturally it goes to olvido the longer I go without remembering it. Is that bad? I don’t think so. My memory functions as we’ve naturally formed it to function, just like everyone else’s. What would it mean to have photographic collections of these events accessible to me always? My memory function would have been off-shored to a walled garden where I must submit to being held hostage to a worsening user experience if I want to continue to have access.
If I have easy access to memories of every fun night I’ve had, there’s no need for my memory to prioritize the truly best moments. And maybe this makes a person’s memory atrophy because they don’t have to use it as much. And maybe this has ramifications for interpersonal relationships as well, since the memory albums are right there on Facebook, and you don’t need another person to remind you of something you said that night, or how it felt, or some other aspect that you may have already forgotten.
olvido - forgetting? If you look it up in a dictionary a lot of times you’ll see it defined as oblivion but when was the last time you spoke to someone and used that word? When was the last time you read it? It’s not one we use very often. I don’t know how I would construct a sentence in which to use that word nor what it would even be about. I don’t think about any what’s-his-face in terms of the good times we had together went into the hole of oblivion along with his name; for me it’s just a huh, I really can’t remember that guy’s name.