Never Seen
The next time you are walking down a familiar suburban sidewalk right as the sunset is fading, stop.
Stop dead in your tracks.
Don’t worry about seeming silly. Don’t watch for supercilious stares. Stand still. Not at an intersection, nor at a mailbox, nor at a lamppost. Stop in the middle of a step that you are expected to finish. Stop, and if you blink your eyes and still know where you are, stop that, too.
Just stop.
Stop and imagine that you have been dropped from the sky to where you now stand.
Stop, and tell me when the air starts to get familiar. I am curious. Does it take months to get to know, does it take in it to grow?
I have returned to childhood bedrooms that seem as foreign as they once flowed, brick like bones and painted veins that once signified home, so let me ask you, what’s the difference between the first time you laid eyes on that birthday gift and the fiftieth, what’s the difference between old wrinkled lips and fresh ones pursed to kiss, what’s the difference between the stoplight you pass every day to work and one you’ve never seen or heard,
or felt. Cold, stagnant, scintillating.
See, I am midthought and midstep ambling past Maine street as usual and I walk into a thick wall called jamais vu. At first I wonder, is this okay? That’s what our social conceptions have done to our freedoms: convert them into anxieties, is this okay. I allow myself an exasperated sigh and glance around, and then, I stop minding them, freeze, and take a look around.
The next time you are reducing everything in your life to postulations of the past, stop.
I tell myself that I have never walked past this place before. The house across the street, the power lines and the slope, the trees across the way and the parking lot stretch, I have never experienced this town before. The buildings refuse me and I let them, diaphanous things they’ve become, I stop looking at them as if I know them by name, convinced that they are generic facades on a typical small-town street. It works. This scene, this could be from anywhere, any picture, any movie. My memories of this place might set it apart, but what good is the familiarity if it makes me skim over? Is it not indolent for me to stop seeing, to stop noticing? To look at things and see the past but not the present?
We think that it would enervate our world-weary minds to treat old things as new, but this is a lie. It enervates us to stop seeing and to stop wondering, to stop learning like uprooted hearts still beating with bewilderment.
So, I let it feel new. The bricks and arches, the spaces in between, the crosswalk and the lawn extending left of me. It feels so new that I am hopeful I might break out of my bridle with teeth snarling, hooves stamping, and mind reared. It feels so new that I am afraid I am lost completely; that if you dropped me here in a dream I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or gain my bearings, wouldn’t be able to find my way home.
I hate that memory is a blessing and a curse like this; if it was one or the other, I’d have my answers. Instead I stand in the dimming summer air, simmering thin, wondering if I have been spending my entire life trying to be someone else without intending it. Taking after someone else’s clothes, someone else’s lines, someone else’s style, someone else’s home. I don’t want that. I’m standing here in the middle of the sidewalk and cars are passing and people are walking off in all directions and I’m looking at the cement in front of me like I’ve never seen it before, and all of a sudden this is when I feel more independent than I have felt all my life.
It is a short moment. I am unhooked. I am original. I am vast.
So it follows that in all the other moments, I must be a slave.
This is how I want it to break down: the gift of metaphysical molting. To crawl out of my own skin and then look at it, oneiric, lying on dirty sheets and taking wonder in the feel—these are my eyes, this is my nose, I’ve seen it before but never this close. This is home and this is not home, this is familiar but still just as bold.
Sometimes I look at the ceilings, at the walls of my room, at the old tree by the Burton house or the glass panels in the back and I think of them as unique and unexperienced, and it does a wonderful thing—it makes me discover them again, more than I discovered before. Besides, it doesn’t really matter where you’re going as long as you’ve got eager eyes as you walk.
As far as the fear of the unknown goes, while I’m pausing on that sidewalk afraid of getting lost, I can still raise my head to the sky and inhale as deeply as I want. I do not need landmarks or welcome mats. I want novel lights in bygone dawns, and only your billets-doux to anchor me down. Olfaction, see, is the greatest trigger of memory; and for me, it’s all the ones that I want to keep, and so if I’m dropped like a needle on a record I can’t recognize, I will trace the air for the scent of your skin. You are the only home I need to get me through the fear of unfamiliarity. And besides, this is what new experience is about, after all—to change yourself and go back to the start so that you can find, there, everything you want.
You see, it’s funny—they say there are as many galaxies as grains of sand in all the beaches of the whole world, but I can never understand why this makes people want to see space. I tell them, it makes me want to see beaches.
Source: newtheoryoldlove
Remembering Snow
1. I walked in a sea of snow: waves frozen in heaves and troughs, a still white ocean of ceased surging over the land, like a flood soon to abate with the morning’s sun.
2. As I came down the hill, bits of dirt speckled the snow; it became cookie-dough ice cream, and despite the cold I wanted to stop and scoop it into my hands.
Forgive my Southern obsession with snow, but in Oregon I was stunned by its beauty and caught myself constantly metamorphosing it as I walked through it, sank in it, raced across it, tasted it, fell into it shirtless and gasping.
Langer and I are reading a book together which discusses at length the essentially metaphorical quality of language and how metaphor thus acts as the fundamental process of linguistic cognition (and perhaps consciousness).
Language is in some sense itself pure metaphor: “snow” isn’t snow, but as it is our least reducible signifier for snow (or shall we propose that visualization is even more basic than this?) it serves as a reality-replacing sign. We come to think snow is just “snow.” Language becomes reality.
But like all that humans traffic in -from cocaine to comfort, sex to security, lust to love- language wears, and once familiarized through use it is dulled. “Snow” as a sign for snow no longer excites our sense of snow as a phenomenon; it is a word: short, small, inert. Language obscures reality.
Literary metaphor is a means -not the only one- for combating this familiarization, for re-sensitizing us to what has been obscured through use. A potent, amusing, striking metaphor, if well-made, resets our reaction to something, making us take note again, as though in our first love or inhaling our first line.
(That repetition dulls experience is amazing to me; it needn’t be so, one must admit, but is merely a fact of how our acquisitive and apprehensive minds process reality and learn its ways. It is also frustrating: as the decades pass, how much of the universe simply wears off! And we need more and more to feel vital in our reactions: more sex, more travel, more drugs, more venom, more passion, more and more and more. This is the most fundamental element of aging and thus of life-through-time: the attenuation of all experiences to silence).
Metaphor reintroduces you to the world. Whether the metaphors that occur to us resonate with others is impossible to know without asking, and often they don’t. Is this a matter of metaphors which fail to capture the hidden elements of what they describe, or is this personal taste?
But how powerful the right metaphors can be! We see again and again in literature how words can suddenly forces us into contact with reality. In one tired phrase, a worn-out word or a cliche, they hide the world; in the vivid metaphor, they smash us into it:
“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
Source: mills
We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.
Source: mjt.org
Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.
People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves.
Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute.
(via Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age)
Source: Guardian
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Here are some 