What is our painful memory of life but the melted wax artefacts of so many errors and regrets, sometimes softly revisited and sculpted into little candles of light as lanterns by which we might then see the long road that ever lies before us? What is a hope of future happiness but that distant shore […]
Tag: memory
Forgotten
People don’t fear death anywhere near so much as they are afraid of being forgotten. It is all part of a strange game we play with in which a symbolic life and the complex narratives of abstraction we build around living comes to envelop and invalidate the concrete facts upon which that fragile experience so […]
Building new worlds…
If it is true that all we ever create is only ever made from the dusty ash and broken pieces of that which came before us, why is it that our words and worlds always seem to break us all the more? A beach is the aggregate material memory and gathered remains of a billion […]
Murakami’s Talking Cat
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory”. – Haruki Murakami. A talking cat – clearly an absurdity but in many ways no less absurd than that any of the mad parade of human civilisation and the shared confusion and beauty of this […]
Narrative Predestination
I read “Lord of the Rings” twice at age 9. I imagine this must have had some kind of formative downstream consequence for my own cognitive grammar, conceptual vocabulary and integrated perception of those grander narratives and historical tides within which we all must necessarily learn to swim if we are to survive and thrive […]
If my life was a novel…
“In the end, we all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood My life would not be a book so much as it would be a box of scattered paper fragments. Each fragment containing a narrow aperture on the life and experience or learning I have undergone. Each narrow aperture, a window on a moment and a […]
Time and Memory
Just living is proving to be quite difficult, at times. I really miss being a child and not constantly feeling as though I have to second-guess everything both I and everyone else do or think and feel. There is a simple state of just existing, of simply being present in life that seems to leave […]
Half sunk a shattered visage lies…
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
Imperfect Past
No flower is perfect. The flowers of memory are always more beautiful because they only ever live in imagination. In truth – all knowledge is of the past and in this moving moment we are never anchored upon reality so much as on an embellished fantasy and fading memory of sensation and experience. Such is […]
Letters to Eternity
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
Boxes of Books
I recently received several boxes of books that had once belonged to my father. He died around 10 years ago now and these books seem to be the last traces of his life left to touch my world in any material manner. I had the strangest sensation and revelation as I stood there and stared, […]
Grief
All grief is love, veiled.