buzzing
I very foolishly drank half a cup of caffeinated coffee at work tonight (b/c I was soooooooooo sleeeeeeeeeepy and I'd been working soooooooooooo many hoooooooooooouuuuuuurs) and now I'm home at nearly 1am, vibrating with awakeness. So I thought I'd pass the time until that wears off by posting a little something.
I was looking through this old notebook the other day and I found something I wrote in 2002. It's just a fragment of an idea I was trying to work out in my mind, and when I read it I thought it was pretty cool. I realized, flipping through this notebook, that law school sort of stomped and squashed the passion for art and words and poetry and philosophy out of me. There was a time when those things were more fluid and present in my life. I'll have to grow back into it, I guess.
Anyway, here's the thing I wrote. Maybe you'll find it interesting too.
"The idea that it's not the events *themselves* that are meaningful -- but the impact of the events -- later -- hours or years -- the way events warp you, change your direction -- the way your path curves around the events -- the way you grow crooked bark over the old wounds -- and the slivers, flashes of memory which are the only remains of the event itself -- for the event itself is like an explosion, a non-thing, the only part of any event that lives is the *memory* of that event. The burn mark it makes against the wall of your mind."
(I guess I was in a double-dash phase...)
I was looking through this old notebook the other day and I found something I wrote in 2002. It's just a fragment of an idea I was trying to work out in my mind, and when I read it I thought it was pretty cool. I realized, flipping through this notebook, that law school sort of stomped and squashed the passion for art and words and poetry and philosophy out of me. There was a time when those things were more fluid and present in my life. I'll have to grow back into it, I guess.
Anyway, here's the thing I wrote. Maybe you'll find it interesting too.
"The idea that it's not the events *themselves* that are meaningful -- but the impact of the events -- later -- hours or years -- the way events warp you, change your direction -- the way your path curves around the events -- the way you grow crooked bark over the old wounds -- and the slivers, flashes of memory which are the only remains of the event itself -- for the event itself is like an explosion, a non-thing, the only part of any event that lives is the *memory* of that event. The burn mark it makes against the wall of your mind."
(I guess I was in a double-dash phase...)
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 12:48 AM
4 Comments:
i like it, especially the bit about crooked bark. sure, it's heavy on the mrs. dash but i like the sentiments.
the double dashes are kind of adorable, particularly since you could have edited them out in the copy.
and what you write just reminds me of the flow of everything, the teleology of life, the constant becoming.
nice sharing.
thanks RPP
and the coffee
I've thought about that before, how it's not what happened to you that's important, it's the lasting feelings after it. The past really doesn't exist anywhere except in memory, like you said. It can only be reached that way. In my history class, the prof said, "No one can prove that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor!" I think that was when I first realised that there is no "proof" for anything; it all comes from human memory; someone wrote down what they remembered, or what someone else remembered, or took a picture (you still have to trust that the photographer photographed what they say they they photographed...)
The pain of feelings can be permanent, though. That's why it pisses me off that people can hurt you and then say, "It's the past, get over it, I can't undo it." That is, of course if they acknowledge whatever it was they done in the first place...after all, you can't "prove" it...
Beautifully expressed. I completely agree.
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