Memory

 Still from the video, M_E_M_O_R_Y

The act of memory— how it circles around to condemn you, or to lift you up to give meaning to your life— struck me as particularly poignant on my trip back East last month.

For instance,

Tupolev Tu-154, the Soviet-era plane that crashed in Smolensk

Wojciech Seweryn, the Polish artist and community leader from Chicago, joined the ill-fated flight to Russia with the Polish president on April 10, to pay tribute to his officer father who'd been slain by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn Woods in 1940. Wojciech, the artist from Chicago, died only a few miles from where his father, the Polish officer, had been killed.

Which got me thinking about my own memories, memories about my family, about living in New York, about how the act of remembering—or its opposite, the act of forgetting—shapes one's hand. 

What is memory? Is it who we are, or who is remembered?  
And, so, to that, a video about memory: