Memory. The earliest thing you can remember.
Him? A small swimming pool on the balcony, filled with sand and sea water and the tiny barnacles and minnows and mussels and crabs he'd stolen from the beach, slowly dying, the ocean smell coming through the balcony door. "The Wide World of Disney", it must have been in the summer. Finding a plastic jumbo jet in his cereal. Running into the street and being run-over by a car.
Hers? He doesn't know. He should ask but will have to wait until they meet.
You don't want to start this, but - it's an exercise, fondly remembering things, go through your history, how did you get here?
Remember - your first kiss, awkward, the heart pounding, the clumsy fumbled bungling's and groping's of the first love lost, less so the second, and third...
This memory, by necessity it's patchy, you could not remember it all, it would take you as long again to relive your life. But as you came into consciousness, there is more and more to remember: Friends, schools, names, places slip; revisit them. People too often wait until they're too old to remember, the faculty, without exercise, has disappeared.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago you might commission a statue to commemorate a person or event. Or a portrait, but sitting for a portrait might take quite a while, days or even weeks, think of poor Lisa Gherardini, going to sit year after year, always the artist adding in a new detail, reworking her smile, plumping her up, another line here or there, the very paint itself craqueling before he's done. Or a gravestone, the shrouded curves of death reaching from the tomb, she's a sensual figure. Is it Persephone? Or the deceased? It might be written down, but - well, as we know, to write it down is at best to lie about it.
Memories lie, they are imprecise, we are by nature impressionable, pieces of books, short bits of film intrude upon them, embroid themselves into our brains - are we remembering something that happened to us? Or something, perhaps that was told to us? Or that we saw or read and made such an impression that we adopted as our own, made it a part of us.
We hang on to them, take out the favorites, play back in our minds cherished memories, places, people, events, or replay memories of trauma, unpleasantness, imagine our exacting of revenge, the cutting words we'll deliver at our next encounter.
By their very nature fragile, elusive, we find touchstones for memories, souvenirs of vacations, a pebble picked up here or a shell from this beach, knick-knacks and clutter bought in shops, relatable only to the person that acquired it, the next owner - should there be one, will have the memory of finding marked down at a garage sale, or pulling it off the shelf of an abandoned home.
An enameled locket, within 2 portraits, he/she, together with a twist of her hair. A rich keepsake from lovers long expired.
Technology now augments memory in ways never before possible.
First the camera - daguerreotypes, tintypes, photography, now memory could be staged and captured, affordable to almost everyone, and as it improved everyone could preserve their memories on flimsy bits of celluloid and paper.
Memory, now external.
Now we capture speech, the Edison Phonograph and cylinders. By our standards, primitive, but by those of the day a miracle. Wax cylinders, platters, records.
With every increment in technology comes the urge to falsify it. Spirit Photography - disembodied heads looking down from swathes of cotton, or perhaps standing behind the subject, hand on the sitters shoulder, faded, still dressed as they were in life, the afterlife could not provide a change of clothing.
Always they are near, closer than you think, than you should be comfortable with by far. For a while it is the rage, people lining up to be deceived, then it passes.
Photography becomes film, silent, black and white, accompanied by a pianist, Willis O'Brian's "The Lost World" or Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; we can film now the past, the present, and use the camera as a lens into the speculative future.
Technology perfects itself, evolves, becomes color, there are vast improvements in quality and sound, always the technology gets both smaller - and better - information now now longer on records, or tape or celluloid, entirely digital, unlimited convenience, there is nothing you can't afford to document,
With this, of course, is the perfection of the photograph, of video, of audio recording, we have immediate back-up of our memories, so many backups that were it not for the technology we rely on to store it we'd lose our place, forget that we were ever there.
But - strange, the things that remind me the most of her - touchstones, of mine own, not her photograph, but a certain song we shared - or another. There were many. You go there, careful, not too often or you will wear it out, memory like the groove on a record - for memory, every time you visit, is slightly changed, altered, and the poignancy is lost.
And her smell. Her smell, nose close - This I can't remember. And - odd, I would know it if I smelt it again, have smelt it, thought I smelled it, driving through the mountains late at night, perhaps it was cued by song on the radio, or at a perfume counter - and sniffing them all until my nose is worn out, no, she is not here.
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- Category: Love
He's walking through the rain, water pools in the gutters, streetlamps glisten on the street.
Turn right, up a flight of steps, the P from the bookstore lit with a flickering yellow light, the P, if you look close, wrought into the shape of a man tied, his liver being pecked by a eagle, a fitting motif for the Prometheus Press.
There is no bookstore better than this.
It is open. Sometimes late, often not at all and you're left in the alley, peering in through windows at the towering silhouettes of shelves of books, a labyrinth, a maze, the hours posted, they're no more than a rough guideline, an ideal, in practice it's unpredictable, the proprietor, he's out looking at or buying books himself, or on a day off, or perhaps organizing or pricing, whatever booksellers do when they're not open.
Inside, well, let me take you inside. The sections - there are sections, roughly, if you wander around you will find the order, there's history, and today those shelves are marked with an old set of scales and weights from the gold rush - from world history - books on Assyria, clay cuneiform tablets reassembled, photographed, drawn, with translation, Enheduanna, Shuruppak, from here to Africa, European, the comparatively recent Herodotus, and these at one end flow towards the more local history, things of relevance to where you are living now, and at the other into anthropology, the oral traditions, cultures and customs of others, then into mythology, religion, fairy and folk tales of the world...
You pick your way among the shelves. They are full, books are piled in towers at their foot, you need to pull them away to look at the books behind, to pull out a book and then discover behind it an entire new hidden row...
It would seem you could not, in an afternoon or a weekend, even just lightly scan the smallest portions of the titles available.
There is literature, roughly classed, the foreign and translated authors on one wall, the rest, the more familiar, opposite, I say literature although it might be more often called "fiction" - but this proprietor, his books are curated, there seems to be a discrimination in the books he acquires, values, those he doesn't end up on the free table outside.
And discriminating indeed. First editions, a tinted edition of Vesalius's "De humani corporis fabrica libri septem", an illustrated Irish manuscript, bound, in vivid colors, under glass and there is, at this point, no asking the price, works on architecture - the books, not just prints, many booksellers would buy them up, frame each print separately, triple, quadruple their profits, no - this proprietor, he loves his books. There are old illustrated encyclopedia, text delicately cut away to reveal the juxtaposition of 100 different century-old technical visions of the future, perfect for the wall, there is a large antique globe, for a time an antique reliquary bookended the Christianity shelves, within? I haven't asked, only know that it gathered such a following he sold it, giant ivory bound bibles, first editions of remarkable poets, there is - where the counter should be if ever it was clear of books, stacks of beautifully tooled leather notebooks, the finest of fountain pens, inkwells, if - if - you should leave here and still have an appetite to write.
Few do. Most are here to find something to read, there is always something, and if you should have no luck it speaks to your humor, not the selection.
There is music. It doesn't intrude, it's played faintly and far away, there is a gramophone somewhere here, you don't notice it until - suddenly - you do. Maybe something foreign, a peculiar and haunting anthropologists recording of such and such a tribe, or perhaps a favorite libretto, even...
Stop, admire the curios. It is a museum of sorts, and the pieces, they come and go. They have no price, merely they await a "reasonable" offer, then disappear and are replaced...
An antique chess set, elaborately carved ivory or bone pieces. A brass ships portal. A small diorama of stuffed toads dressed in the finest Victorian clothes and wigs having a trial.
The scent, well, old books smell of cut grass and hints of vanilla and their owners lives, each one a little different, this one of wine, this of tobacco, but today - there's another scent in the air...
People, quiet, murmuring with the reverence due a library.
A restless heart, to visit a good used bookstore is to travel both through time and space, the wide world of the imaginations is bound up before you, knowledge, speculation, the innumerable whisperings of people you can understand, the friendship of people who never existed, people of character and intelligence, this alone is the clue. Weigh each book in your hand, know it by title, or author, or reputation, or merely know that it has some merit by virtue of it's being here - and - what was it he was looking for again?
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Now a great deal is made about truth.
This is, of course, fiction, completely and utterly fictitious, the people, places, events, they never existed. You know. I'm not concealing it, not a whit. Anything written down of necessity becomes a lie - for it is never as simple as all that, no matter how I try to persuade you, it is - it becomes - a lie the moment that you read it. Know this.
Everything you've been told, everything I'm telling you now, everything I'm going to tell you, lies, lies and more damnable lies.
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Who are you really? Where is the key to ourselves?
Consider, firstly, the highly improbably fact of your existence.
That since life first began on earth, bacteria devouring bacteria, evolving, into single celled organisms, one always devouring another, the battle for survival - now multi-celled, now something resembling what we might consider life, always - one devouring another, a predator and prey - and you - the sum total of all creation, you've survived - the output of billions of generations of the fiercest competition that evolution could devise.
And here you are.
And, this - we take it for granted. If we have children this continues, if not - well, you had a good run, 3 billion years of ancestors staring blindly into the future, wondering what it was all for...
We are born without the ability to care for ourselves. Completely, utterly, naked and helpless, there is not a human being that could be birthed anywhere on earth and survive without the care of others of our species.
This is how it goes. You are born, and from the moment you first open your eyes you are being inculcated, indoctrinated, into the world(s) of those who birthed or cared for you.
Everything you become is a result of them. Your every early experience, prejudice, personality, opinion, ambition, these are inherited. We are, however inadvertently, the sum of other peoples experiences and their childhoods, and so on and so forth.
This is their gift to you. This is their curse upon you.
Struggle as you may you cannot shake these things off. You are born an empty vessel to be filled up with the experiences of others, and in time - when you are old enough - you will begin to have your own experiences, and these will be profoundly shaped by those early experiences with those others.
You become a collage, an assembly of other peoples hopes and unfulfilled ambitions, of other peoples prejudices, opinions, whether you shared them or disagreed with them.
Perhaps you realized this, you were a rebellious teenager, were moody and despised your parents, broke the rules, loathed the class that birthed you - but in this too you are not yourself, you are merely opposing that which you do not want to become.
Your destiny, it would seem, is inescapable.
But who are you?
Arguably you are the sum of your interactions, of what you eat, of what you read, watch on TV, read on the internet, listen to on the radio - but where does the SELF reside? The you? Take away these things and think. Quiet any thoughts, intrusions, imagine self without the heap of opinions and prejudices that have shaped you, impressed you, that you have bought into or rebelled against, think without language, who - what - are you?
Breathe. Feel your body from the inside out. Control first the breath. This is the easiest. Now, try to bring under control the heart, reduce your heartrate, grope about your viscera with your mind, can you feel your liver? kidneys? lungs? Move your consciousness through your body. See if you are well. Can you do this? Yet - every single function of the body - at some level - moves through or reports to the mind.
I have taken it too far, perhaps. There - we first need to quiet the mind - as nature abhors a vacuum so does it loathe an open mind - thoughts race, jostle for attention, no sooner have we let one go than another insinuates itself in it's stead...
It is a journey, this - for sure, to find a quiet space in one's own head.
And when we're not trying there are a host of distractions, emotions, we are hungry, tired, bored, in pain, we've obligations, bills to pay, people to meet, the list, verily, is endless.
The chick still in the egg recoils from the shadow of the hawk, the tarantula-wasp is born and knows to eat, knows - when it is time - to do what her mother never taught her, to find another tarantula, lay her egg, and these are - next to us, but insignificant creatures, possessed of the smallest portion of consciousness and intelligence.
What instincts are we born with? There must be some, a heap, a human template of psychology that is mapped onto us at birth - that makes us - well, human. Then what of the Ego - that tower we build for ourselves, which - so rarely do we have any say in the building of - it is built for us, by everyone I have mentioned and more besides, we are really prisoners, look from the highest window you can find and see yourself surrounded, everyone within their fleshy cell, each their own survivor, a prodigy of evolution, a miracle of chance, and not one of them with even a glimmer of self awareness.
It is time. Tear down the tower or build a bridge.
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- Category: Love