Remembering What Happens

It is very difficult to know what the “right” memory might be.  Everything is actually:  how it felt, how it seemed, what happened, in fact ALL of it is WHAT HAPPENS, and continues changing with each instant.

So I’m stuck selecting, revising, innovating, adapting – re-membering – we call it.  The continuous process of limitedly attending to our experiences from as many angles and aspects as we are made of, and assembling them according to each moment’s need, or, our felt need to make new senses of being ongoingly alive.

However, not “stuck,” but rather tremendously active, pulsing, vibrating, jittering and triggering – “flowing” it seems to some – adjusting, adapting, regulating, surviving – ever re-membering my present.  WHAT HAPPENS.

beachy-quick

“Emerson thought the mind’s nature was volcanic…A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen.  It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference.  It looks the same but we are imagining it.  Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one’s life, mountains’ forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one’s own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms.”

– Dan Beachy-Quick-

5 thoughts on “Remembering What Happens

"A word is a bridge thrown between myself and an other - a territory shared by both" - M. Bakhtin

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s