"memory isn’t really a phenomena of the internal self; it requires invocation from the world" I immediately associated this with fevers. The state of being in fever or being sick is so foreign until the flood of sickness as memory engulfs you and you then forget what non-sickness is.
Also - your concept of the horcrux of memories is fascinating - it makes me wonder what happens when places you've stored associations with decay or are destroyed? Your ability to relate to these places will never be whole. I feel like this whenever I see the big motorway at The Crescent near Annandale - I can never relate to that place like I can as a child. It's mutated.
The writing in this piece is really elegant - so impressed with language choice & fascination with the tiny details.
I really like that idea - 'Your ability to relate to these places will never be whole' - but I also think it's not true all the way through. It's funny the older you get the more you find yourself repeating the behaviour of those old crones who will bore you of stories of how this servo used to be where aunty so-and-so lived, but I think it's indicative of the natural instinct to want to revive 'decayed' associations.
The impulse to tell a story is an attempt to make sense of a reality that has been lost to time faster than we can comprehend it (reality as a whole changes faster than we can comprehend, but places and people are particularly notable, because we live in such physical and emotion relation to them).
All this to say I think there's a remedy to the loss of a place, which is to share its memory as wide and as faithfully as possible, and the good news that doing we so can create something even larger than itself. This is where the need to make art and tell stories and write eulogies and so on comes from.
This ladders up to something else I feel strongly about, which is that we have a moral duty to bear witness to the world and to each other. It is a waste of the amount of sheer luck it requires for something ordinary to happen, whether the fertile conditions leading to a lotus budding in mud or a mother goose leading her brood of ducklings along the bank, for it to not be witnessed, to be in the presence of a conscious being and not have any impact. The world needs us to witness it as we need it to witness us. It is beyond a cheesy self-help tactic to exercise gratitude but a moral imperative of our existence because we exist in a 'family of things':
'Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.'
So if you love something you feel you have lost, you should give it the honour of being remembered by you in great and idiosyncratic detail.
you write beautifully
thankyou!
very happy Coonabarabran boy received a mention
she contains multitudes, lover and hater girl
"memory isn’t really a phenomena of the internal self; it requires invocation from the world" I immediately associated this with fevers. The state of being in fever or being sick is so foreign until the flood of sickness as memory engulfs you and you then forget what non-sickness is.
Also - your concept of the horcrux of memories is fascinating - it makes me wonder what happens when places you've stored associations with decay or are destroyed? Your ability to relate to these places will never be whole. I feel like this whenever I see the big motorway at The Crescent near Annandale - I can never relate to that place like I can as a child. It's mutated.
The writing in this piece is really elegant - so impressed with language choice & fascination with the tiny details.
I really like that idea - 'Your ability to relate to these places will never be whole' - but I also think it's not true all the way through. It's funny the older you get the more you find yourself repeating the behaviour of those old crones who will bore you of stories of how this servo used to be where aunty so-and-so lived, but I think it's indicative of the natural instinct to want to revive 'decayed' associations.
The impulse to tell a story is an attempt to make sense of a reality that has been lost to time faster than we can comprehend it (reality as a whole changes faster than we can comprehend, but places and people are particularly notable, because we live in such physical and emotion relation to them).
All this to say I think there's a remedy to the loss of a place, which is to share its memory as wide and as faithfully as possible, and the good news that doing we so can create something even larger than itself. This is where the need to make art and tell stories and write eulogies and so on comes from.
This ladders up to something else I feel strongly about, which is that we have a moral duty to bear witness to the world and to each other. It is a waste of the amount of sheer luck it requires for something ordinary to happen, whether the fertile conditions leading to a lotus budding in mud or a mother goose leading her brood of ducklings along the bank, for it to not be witnessed, to be in the presence of a conscious being and not have any impact. The world needs us to witness it as we need it to witness us. It is beyond a cheesy self-help tactic to exercise gratitude but a moral imperative of our existence because we exist in a 'family of things':
'Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.'
So if you love something you feel you have lost, you should give it the honour of being remembered by you in great and idiosyncratic detail.