Halfway through today that giant hole/feeling of emptiness finally caught up with me, and, as I was dozing off on the bus to work, I mulled over some qualities of the nature of long-term remembrance.
[The end of last night was so sudden, so chilling, and so rather reminiscent of certain other fresh wounds and clean breaks from once upon a time. If this were a bone it would have been a greenstick fracture; the jagged edges and sharp projections screamed hurt, pain, and lonesome abrupt premature demise. The parents of my look had run off, and awaiting me on that then-empty second floor corner room on Neil was only one or two leftover hands who didn't go at all, who remained only to clean up. It was desolation at its very best; it was the untreasured postclimax. It was the cold stink of aftermath as I wrapped myself inside the detached train of my skirt.]
There is no discrimination between memory of just one second ago and memory of fifteen, eight, or four years back. On that bus, I attested to this. Regardless of its linearity or circularity in the grander scheme, time remains cruelly unidirectional for us objects traversing space. What is memory?
The best I can pinpoint is a class of dual-action that occurs simultaneously: a vision of things as I saw them then behind what my eyes currently input, and a feeling, a contraction, a reaction of some kind from that familiar place at the diaphragm pushing into and lifting from my stomach. There, regardless of age, quality, or quantity, the playback system tells me it is fair and just, as I see them all clear as clear can be. The brain is capable of playing tricks on the cache, but the system for retrieval is undeniably cleanly functional. There, on that bus, the quality of image with which I remember my studio takes on a same texture as I do that townhouse in Forest Hills. As I stare at passerby whirling back, one with the land, they, too, become memory irrevocably. The moment is permanently lost no matter how much I strain to hold their snapshot imagery in that frozen stance against my occipital. It joins the library of all others in a selectively limitless base. From hence on, all flavor of reality it once held is lost; all texture that remains is one artificial, web-like scale series that feels identical to all the rest. The chair on which I sit and type now is entirely different from the chair in my mind as I unnecessarily unfeelingly reminisced on a moving bus. I am returned to it, unlike I have never returned to so many other moments in space and time, and already, even so, it is a different chair. This hasn't even anything to do with all of our nanoscopic erosions and sheddings and denaturations. This is no termite pseudergate.
Because time only propagates one way for us, and brains can only do so much.
2 comments:
how the hell did you get that picture of Phil....? I thought he disappeared off the face of the earth.
and boy needs to get some meat on his bones. Looks like he'll collapse from the wind any second.
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