hello friends,
it's been a long time. the dreary week is upon me. the teary week. weak. cheek. cheeky creaky leaky freaky meek. me. its that kind of week. i've had them before. i will have them again. they come, every 28 days to be precise.
I've been thinking about memory. Not so much the technical intricacies of building memory. More the triggers for recalling memories. Those of you who know me well probably also know that I have a bad memory. For some things. I don't recall events very well. It's easy for me to recast the memory, placing myself at the centre of events. Or in a position of innocence. Remembering and retelling are two different things.
I remember my friend's apartment to be facing west when in actuality it faces east. I've looked out his windows many times, but the key instance, the formative gaze, was on my first visit. I was nervous and excited. Everything tingled. I had no idea what was going to happen. I went to the window and looked out, hoping to ground myself in the skyline, the concreteness of the city. But instead my gaze was met by haze, that icy fog that swaddled Vancouver in November, obscuring the mountains, the view. Making it hard for me to see what was ahead, to anticipate. Instead I had to turn away from the window, to look into the room in which I was standing. To make a deal with real time. I'm glad that I did.
I remember loving the fog. I think I even wrote about it here. I loved feeling insulated from the future, if only what was coming at me on the visual plane. I loved the hush it brought to the city. The halos around the lights, everything was holy.
The bright cold sunshine of last week has its own merits. The brilliance of the light that illuminates everything, all nooks and crannies. The light that burns away the mold, that allows our clothes to dry, that combats the inevitable mid-winter blahs of greys that sads and boo-hoos.
And then today the clouds were back. Not low like fog, but low like a wool blanket. Scratching the skin but keeping us warm. Making me want to stay in bed. So maybe its not the time of the month, but the way of the sky. The firmament. Those pounds of pressure, of oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen that weigh down on us — the resistance against which the earth's crust presses — it holds us together othewise we would explode, spinning slowly out into the universe like that art piece I saw in London. A garden shed exploding, but frozen, and all the smithereens suspended around a naked, hanging lightbulb.
(Can I bring it home?) Is memory the lightbulb, the bright centre of the exploding chaos of our brains, that which attacts us like moths to bash our brains against her heat? Memory. What are we without memory? Bodies and action... but what of our trail. Slugs leave a slime trail, glistening paint along the forest floor. The detritus builds up on their bodies, it travels down to their tails, lubricated by the slime. But they do not discard what they have gathered. No, instead they turn around and eat it. It feeds them. Maybe that's what memory does for us: feeds our hunger for garbage. (ooooo, that's so cynical, but I couldn't resist... the ending was inevitable, you shouldn've seen it coming when I started on the whole slug line.... )
Good night friends. I'll be back sooner than later.
