[Image: “I Work Better,” by John E. Simpson. During our road trip, we became intimately, excruciatingly familiar with the stubborn and unpredictable personalities of hotel luggage carts — the resistance to movement forward and back, the eccentric swiveling. At this hotel in Hannibal, Missouri, the luggage carts at least included helpful steering instructions.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Summer Solstice
I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.
(Stacie Cassarino [source])
Not from whiskey river:
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
(Gabrielle Zevin [source])
…and:
You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.
(Richard Powers [source])
…and:
#50: Memories bind ineluctably to time — not just time since, but time contemplated. To remember a profound experience, it must have lasted long enough for you to consider back then. And later, you must have at your disposal a block of time to fill in all the gaps around the experience, with contexts real or imagined, as the case may be. The sudden sharp pain that time you accidentally slivered off a fingertip: that didn’t qualify as an experience, and to look back on the moment now is not to remember it. But “Born to Run” playing on the stereo; the block of cheddar, with its red wax casing; the small wooden chopping board on which you were preparing a snack, and the wooden-handled cheese knife with the thin, broad blade; the abrupt splash of carmine across the countertop and in the sink; the wad of paper towels swaddling the finger;the panicky stumble down the stairs; the frightened eyes of your landlady; the mad dash to the emergency room; and most of all, the translucent quarter-inch of flesh which you imagined, crazily, might need to be surgically reattached — with all that context, yes: now, that’s a memory.
Further, to be later cemented into your self, a memory — like a garden flower — requires time spent caring for it. It requires water and fertilization; it requires contemplation. With the rest of your life before you, if you flit about madly from experience to new experience, you may “remember” things which have happened to you. But you will not have memories.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
