Maybe
memory feels artificial, or muddled or unimaginably locked away behind a pane of
cephalic glass for a reason. Maybe it’s not meant to be the thing we focus
ourselves on. That being said, sometimes we are only left with memory as we see
it. As we write the story inside the cavities, and down the waterfalls of
reasons past, it can never be got rid of, unless our poor bodies fail us as they
often do, making us do things we didn’t intend on or think was the direction we
ought to go. Most times memory can wake up the aliveness in us, and it should,
but it only should be used in that manner. In aiding not our capturing of the
present for a future memory, wind beating itself wildly yet unable to permeate
the sepia glass behind which nothing shakes or is stirred no matter the new
force arriving to perhaps join it. Memory cannot become a parallel falsehood by
which we exist only half-heartedly in our lives. There is a great and
immeasurable difference between not fighting the waves -- thrashing about in an
open sea when you must see where they take you-- and surrendering to them
wholly, offering them up your will as a sacrifice, without care or interest in
where they might take you, when your body, when left to its own weighted
physicality, sinks like a stone, impermeable and smooth, to the bottom.
Sometimes there lie great treasures at the bottom, but admittedly, as many have
said who have been there, it’s not all that easy to push your way back up to the
top, to the bubbles of air, the light beam creatures swimming with curves and
showing you the way back.
Memory
is caught in all of these places – in the dense waters that are so deep that
light and texture don’t reach there, in the picture you painted in your mind to
replace the one you see, is it real or is it created by you? What of us isn’t
created by you? Is it one single dreamer or are we all dreaming our own tiny
little corners of the proscenium and, is there an audience or are we just
paddling our tiny boats alone. One thing I am sure of, a sureness that is felt
in the sinews and blood fluids and not felt by logic or fact, is that our world
if you will, is exactly what we are making of it.
It
does not, however, come without strands which have been borne before us, which
have a pull to more than just our selves and individual lifetimes, but it is
never rooted in those strands, or rather it is the opposite – we grow down into
them, into earth, dirt, connection and staying in place, but they do not pull us
from the sky enough that we are helpless. I think I really loathe that word. I
can’t say there is a personal why, but it is the case all the same. We are not
parceled and bound and sent off to sea by these puppeteers of the sky trying
make a buck and make a name for themselves, no. It is not just That. There is
also what we do with every moment and there are a million routes here, patterned
invisibly in the blue water, which is not blue but a reflection of the sky,
which makes us think of when we were 3 years old and we sat on our mother’s lap
on a rocking chair and asked her why the sky was blue, and where the universe
started and stopped, and what was beyond it and where was God and what happened
Before everything was created? There was the same silence then as there is now,
as one gets lost in this memory whilst sitting in the same rocking chair, in a
place far from that home, looking out at the water and the waves being idled by
meandering tugboats – dim golden light in rain, red and yellow and black. They
look so clean from here.
These
memories are a neverending game, and there are more of them every day – more
with losses, and lovers, and mistakes. More with regret and boredom and plan.
We can use them in all their glory no matter whether they really happened that
way or we are painting them in this colour, shape and light. The waves are
formless, and we, coupled with some of the strands of our communal past, do the
forming. It is when the idea of memory distracts us from our creation that they
become a wider trouble to us. Sometimes when the boat is sinking, you drive
yourself mad looking for all the places where there might be holes. Doesn’t
stop it from sinking, and maybe the thematic understanding of why it sinks is
more important than the physical one. Paranoia sets in. And then we are lost
to fear and loneliness. We must never let that happen. Keep painting up to
the sky which may or may not really be blue, keep walking towards the ends of
the universe, for you may not know what is beyond but it can only be greater
than a memory, and those ends are often reachable by sinking, by plodding, by
continuing the creation of the world with which you are a part. An
indispensible part. It is even better to not do this alone, but one memory or
another will always have you with it. You can shatter the glass and let the
wind inside, and the rain, and the smelly scales of fish who cannot figure out
how, in their own minds, to transform into mermaids – or better. A thing of
beauty not named, because it need be named by you. There lies the importance,
in these rows of boats, and drowning children and those unborn to themselves,
memory is simply a living, breathing part of the experience of now – the four
corners, the two tides, the coming and the going all at once. It is a rocky
road with a mosaic of infinite roads and no road at all. It is liquid and it
moves us towards each other and into ourselves. The secrets to this are not yet
had, but the picture of memory is only as real as we consider our moment-
instant, approaching and out of our grasp. The warm, celestial water splashes
up and kisses us on the cheek and we can only look up and realize our place in
the painting. Searching for a center when it encompasses us with every detail
of weather, behind every fold in our skin, and in our selves. Oars in the
water.
