The Book of the Moving World

Frank.

(Source: myjetpack, via thebookishdark)

1000scientists:

Roberto Bertero

Just thought I’d re-blog this because it snowed in Vail last night (May 23rd) and some of my best friends here love ice climbing…

(via domorethanexist)

(Source: ohwellsuchislife, via thestorycanresume)

(via tea-time-for-sylvielou)

Anita Brookner, “Rules of Engagement”

To love someone is a most disabling thing.  The effects of a real love are lingering and acidic: a strangely invasive cocktail of longing for both presence and absence.   As even the most ardent philosopher must admit, one cannot be both here and not.  One might be distracted, displaced, disillusioned, but may never assume the dichotomy of here-ness and absence in its entirety.  Love, then it seems, births a perplexing impossibility indeed.   We try to push and pull at the same time.  We desire dialogue and covet silence.  This enigma permeates the various other quotidian domains of our lives: the professional, the artistic, the financial…. any number of achievements and responsibilities that we would rather not have tinged with the indecisiveness and apprehension that come hand in hand with love.  Confidence and surety become luxuries of the past, and to top it off, even the most extensive thesaurus fails to provide an adequate vocabulary to describe such utter confusion and taxing mindfulness.  Real love is difficult to address, to admit and to dismiss; it is even more difficult to articulate.  These may seem to be the musings of a woman embittered by the “cruel hand of love”—and, in a way, they are. 

And this was supposed to a piece about stories.

But it is, I promise, because in essence, memory, and in turn our propensity to narrate our memories, must shoulder the blame for the innate perplexity of love (and any number of other emotions).

“But”, you might answer, but this thesis is built upon the assumption that we are, by nature, narrative beings— storytellers from birth.  I would answer, rather ardently, that we, each and every one of us, are authors; that we “speak” ourselves into existence over any number of discursive avenues.  And only once we accept this platform of narrative phenomenology, can we begin to ask why we wrestle with love.

We are, as Richard Kearney posits, being scattered “over past, present and future,” and our contemporary temporal existence begs the reflective and interpretive powers of mimetic recounting.  Mythologies across the globe bombard us with evidence of to the “creative magic” of narrative.  The Aboriginal “dreamtime” myth hypothesizes on the generative power of song.  Genesis describes a Christian God who speaks our world into existence over 7 days.  We are “named” when we are born, we learn to name the things and the people around us, and these discursive signs allow us to create meaning out of chaos.  We use these signs to tell the world of our existences, to speak ourselves into the lives which we desire—to plan, to remember, to contemplate, to communicate, to love and to hate.  Stories afford us control; offer us the opportunities to ask “why”, “how” and “when”?  Traumatic events punch holes in our stories and in our memories.   We sometimes choose to omit embarrassments, disappointments and heart-break.  Tragedy, perhaps, forces us to work harder in our narrative pursuits, to compensate for lost understanding, for discrepancies between our pasts and our presence.    

The paradox built by memory is intricate and hateful, but of course, endlessly fascinating.   “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,” Lewis Carroll’s white queen proclaims as she admonishes Alice for her singular perception of recollection.  The Queen’s oneric “madness” provides us insight into the dynamic powers of memory to move us both backward and forward.  Akin to Carroll’s often disconcerting psychedelic narrative stylings, memory is not necessarily restricted to pastel scrap book recollecitons of the past.  Paul Ricoeur comments initially in Memory, History and Forgetting, that “With memory, the absent bears the temporal mark of the antecedent” (19).  Yet, I would argue that the ways in which we arouse, interact with and employ are memories are never restricted to the linear, teleological temporal barriers that dictate our daily discursive endeavors.       

 Our memories add layers to our perceptions and depth to our emotions.  They are the “meat” of our life-stories.  With the addition of, the endless and insistent chatter of reminiscence, what we experience in our simultaneous lives is often complicated to the point of babel.   This voice is what prohibits us from “letting go” of love—something our families and friends tell us we must do in some cases.  Or, consequently, it may gently coax us toward change when we are ready.  By adding density to our thoughts, our opinions, and our emotions, our memories act as ever-present editors to our authorial pursuits.  They are often invoked at the most inconvenient of times— by tastes, words printed on a page, songs, or the deja-vu like recognition of an image or place.  They remind us of the old adage: nothing is as it seems, nobody is as they seem.   Memory is both beautiful and terrible in its insurrection.   We are reminded of past kindnesses, and past cruelties, wishes and worries.  A loved one may be miles away, but he stands before me also, as innumerable memories amass and assemble in his form: a shadow of words and feelings sometimes too raw to face.  Even as we strive to live in the promised peace of the present, the past steps on our flip flops and appears in our rear view mirrors—sprinkling our lives with a spectrum of emotions always to be learned from.  This is one of several reasons why I am certain I could never be a Buddhist, and, how I have begun to uncover the paradox at the heart of love: memory allows us the luxury of having both the present and absent at once, and provokes the inner author we all have inside, aptly named imagination.  

While the word “imagination” typically evokes images of flying, tight-clad pre-pubescents, or surly seamen sporting hooks for hands, I’ve learned that our imaginations are responsible for much more than the occasional holiday to our childhood hinterlands.  Imagination is merely a capacity for creative thought.  Think: 3D glasses of cognition that allow us to think past, around, below, above and through what is directly in front of us both spatially and temporally.    Ironically, it is imagination that furnishes us access to our memories.  If memories are editors, then imagination is a vintage Smith-Corona, or a moleskin, or a Macbook.  My imagination fuels the two-way conversation that I prepare in my head before I meet my employer for the first time.  It gives me the foresight to plan each day and create as many to-do lists as I deem necessary to my happiness.  And perhaps most important to the motif of this treatise, imagination gladly gives me leave to over-analyze the moments spent, philosophies pontificated, and the conversations conversed with the ones that I love.  

Ruminations of memory and imagination naturally invite inquiries into truth and fiction.  The question of “truth” in memory is at best, nebulous.  I often wonder whether we should even be asking whether our memories are “true”, whether there is an apex of candidacy that we can eventually reach.  Paul Rocoeur, in his ahem “dense” volume Memory, History and Forgetting, postures (without taking exact ownership of the argument) that we do expect our memories to provide us with “accurate” portraits of the past.  “The constant danger of confusing remembering and imagining, resulting from memories becoming images in this way, affects the goal of faithfulness corresponding to the truth claim of memory” (7).  A danger?  I’m not sure that so threatening a word is necessary.  I’m also not confident that the “confusion” of remembering and imagining is a thing to be feared and at all avoided.  This discrepancy, of course, has plagued historians through-out measurable time.  And the sociocultural and sociopolitical implications dictating historical documentation are too numerous to list here.  Who holds the pen?  Who is dictating?  Who pays the author?  Regardless of these factors, we still expect our historians to rely truth; the same burden we place on our own minds.  It is ironic that, even though we use our narrative imaginations to recall the past, we do not embrace the same “poetic license” conceded to ‘fiction’ (novels etc) in our memory and history tellings.

galifianafuck:

Interviewer: Why can’t you be alone without Yoko?

John Lennon: But I can be alone without Yoko, but I just have no wish to be. There’s no reason on earth why I should be alone without Yoko. There’s nothing more important than our relationship, nothing. And we dig being together all the time. Both of us could survive apart but what for? I’m not going to sacrifice love, real love for any whore or any friend or any business, because in the end you’re alone at night and neither of us want to be. and you can’t fill a bed with groupies. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a swinger. I’ve been through it all and nothing works better than to have someone you love hold you

(Source: nstama, via lucifelle)

kushkangaroo:

Sweet, Sweet, Drugs

ummm what.