2025-03-16
Just now, I rediscovered a memory.
This encounter is beckoned by chance--"the encounter of an external causality and an internal finality"--and defies the rigidity of predetermination, remaining in virtue of itself an active, unbounded process. The ignition of involuntary memory inundates the brain with its surging excess, but is also a reminder of its latent presence: it is something to be seized, actively, just as it exists in passive appreciation.
As I grow older, I better understand how much there is, stretched past, present, and future. It is such an excess that even fond memories fall to the wayside, lapped up by the ocean of my unconscious until it is conjured back from its depths. I forget, and in every reminder that I have forgotten, I feel the foundation on which I, me, myself, stand, built by signification and differentiation, that I conjure to constrain this otherwise nebulous self, erode. Artifice, not truth.
A product of its scarcity, memory seems to engage in cyclical processes of doing and undoing. We accumulate memories, doing, building on the self. Memories trickle through our fingers like sand, undoing, recontextualizing what the self is, now, in the present. The exercise of involuntary memory reminds the present self, in all of its speckled not-totality, of what was lost. But to say that something is "lost" is to reveal my hand, to reveal how worrying, to me, the fallibility of memory is. I am not confident, and would instead think otherwise, that this worry is universal, though I hope it is shared (as to find solace and communion). For others, to steer light onto the darkness of not-memory might bring comfort without dread. "Lost" is not to disassociate or sever, and perhaps there really is no other way to understand the self with narrative granularity than with selective vision.
They call it the Treehouse. I never liked the name. I think of scraping against the heavens in the fullness of reach and ladders up, ring after ring--when else does the human body constrain its movement in sustained effort exclusively to the frontal plane? But some things are the same, there is a marvelous series of windows, stretching from floor to ceiling with only the mildest interruptions. It's not particularly comfortable, but perhaps that only suits its name better. It was late in the semester, though early in my tenure there. Spring though. The windows caught and refracted the sun's rays so beautifully, right onto my table, settling neatly on top of my workspace, not to intrude. I was busy. Finals. Or midterms. I guess I choose not to capture that minutiae. I overdid it, I always do, but that day I didn't meet my own criticism and fell into a calm respite. Papers sprawled, notes arranged, maybe I was influenced by the sun's gentle embrace, the allocated block of time. I was half watching, half working, but I fell into a magical industry. Sometimes it pulled me away from my focus, enraptured by her creative inquisitiveness and his at first aloof coolness and their magical partnership and world's calm assuredness. I work-watched the whole thing. There was a perfect calmness. A total, bifurcated focus. A bliss that remains ever so difficult to brush against. How could I ever possibly forget this moment?
Breton's been on my mind ever since reading Mad Love. The way he slips from one association to the other in an endless (terminated only by the thickness of the book) expansion and unraveling resonates so deeply with me. Involuntary memory right here is more constrained. It's almost as if its summons led me to delineate an allowance, a confine, of which I can dig and search and recover infinitely, though it is marked, preordained, by some finitude and termination. It was a simple day--I was only working on some physics or math while watching Whisper of the Heart. I cherished that memory for so long until (has anyone ever recounted when?) I lost it, and then I remembered it again. I was on TikTok, saw a video for the same movie, and it all came flooding back, instantly. I had to capture the moment. It was late, but I typed much of this in an attempt to capture its intensity and richness of detail while also understanding what it means, in the greater context of how I understand, using whatever tools and frameworks and accumulated ideologies I can.
Memory is worrying. It has troubled some of the greatest minds; it troubles me as well, though I do not liken myself to them even with the faintest shadow. Is the answer to write? To record? To silence distractions in an attempt to understand the self and all of its incessant murmurings better? What a lovely mummer. Is it okay for it to be troubling? Need we, I only find solace in something, a desperate claw into the sand as the tide coaxes us back to total undoing? The vignette bubbles and escapes its finitude. As spring blooms again, what is your solace? I hope you, we, I appreciate these moments past, present, future again and again. The sun shining. Noise, silence, industry, respite.
I want you to be madly loved.