the sense of an ending

1) Sunlight through the window as I awake in a strange room with unfamiliar wallpaper.

2) A blue couch that acts as a vantage point as different people walk by with bemused stares plastered on their faces.

3) Leaning in for a kiss in the front seat of a car.

4) A boy sitting on a bench in the middle of a park, sobbing uncontrollably as taillights pass him by.

5) The same boy but much younger, staring at his father who is embarrassed of him because he cries too much.

-

As the memories sluice down my brain, I am overcome with a sense of emptiness. Memory acts like a drug, and like all drugs the indulging of memory eventually leads to addiction. This dependency on memory swells till the point that existence is created within memory, and the life lived in the present comes secondary to the one lived in the head.

Memory is history. But more than that it is a guide. Decisions are informed by experience, and experience is hinged on memory. What shaky foundations are laid here, when all our conditions of autonomy are influenced by a series of flashes that may or may not be true.

a + b = x 

To make sense of memory through mathematics would seem logical if not for the fact that memory does not operate based on logic. If the signifier, (a), represents memory, and the signifier, (b), represents experience, the addition of a + b would hypothetically lead to a logical answer. The person existing both here and now, the product of memory and experience, (x). This sense of an ending could seem satisfactory, but the problem lies in the value of memory (a). The slightest of deviations in memory would lead to the outcome of the equation being radically different each time.

This is in essence, the very dilemma that presents itself. Each time I attempt to solve the equation, the value of memory changes and with it the legitimacy of any profound realization I was hoping to extract from all this. The value of memory is a fluctuating one. How can we rely on something that constantly changes with time, that jumps back and forth from one apparent certainty to another? If all our memories are so wildly unstable, so prone to dilution and saturation, what hope is there of an answer? Is there really such a thing as an actual account of what happened? The moment something is experienced, the chemicals in our brains work instantaneously to add impurities to this experience. The truth, if there is any of it, is filtered out semblance by semblance until all that remains is a memory.

All our memories work like circumstantial evidence and we use this information to make conclusions that we are quick to affirm. Categorically, our memories always fall into what is good and what is bad. One, two and three are good ones, four and five less so. But this is only how I remember them. The truth is that we are on shaky ground, the truth is that we are unable to collaborate the event with the memory, the truth is that there is great strife which simmers underneath. The greatest truth perhaps, is that we are all guilty of forgetting.

theories of actualization and realization

another conversation, over a breakfast of whole-wheat bread, sausages, rocket salad and poached eggs:


If life is a gift that no one has asked for yet is thrust upon all of us, do we not have the right to reject this gift? As girls reject chocolates from boys, or as boys reject flowers from other boys, because the acceptance of a gift would carry some form of attached meaning - acceptance (of the gift) and subsequently expectation (what the gift signifies, what the gift alludes to).

The acceptance of life as a gift would also carry a shared albeit dissimilar weight. The weight to live up to this gift, to make the most of life, to at least not waste it. But if this gift of life is one that none of us have asked for, surely we have the option of rejecting it, to make space on an already rented-out planet for someone who could do more with this supposed gift?

This is not to say that I am ungrateful, I understand life for what it is - and I believe it brings with it more good than bad, although this perspective might shift if for instance you asked a young girl forced to bear the child of her rapist if the overall good in her life outweighed the overall bad. The rejection of life is often seen as a deeply philosophical question, perhaps it is because the act of taking one's own life is such an empowering one.

Empowering. Strange choice of words you might ask but what could be more empowering than holding everything in your hands and then choosing to let all of that go? Some may say that this deed is in fact the opposite of a noble autonomous act, that it is cowardly and irresponsible - especially to those that they leave behind. And that it is selfish, this point surfaces time and time again, that it would be a completely self-serving, narcissistic and selfish act. If the rejection of life is a selfish act, could it then be fair to argue that the creation of life is perhaps an equally or even more selfish act?

To force a gift upon someone who had never asked for it. To force upon them so much which they had not asked for, to force upon them so much which you yourself have not come to understand. Why is it that the magnitude of this form of selfishness is not more readily realized whereas its lesser form is vilified?  The rejection of life is after all, wholly dependent and preceded by the selfish act of creating life.

Some might even say that it is liberating -  instead of resigning yourself to a life you've never asked for, instead of watching the years slip by ever faster and having the memories deformed into something weirder each time, instead of accepting a state of passivity, instead of all that you make the choice to recognize life for all it is, its vast potential to hurt and then reconcile, to heal and to scar, to bring great joy and great validation and you accept all of that. To accept all the vagaries of life, and to still choose to put it away. If all of us die someday, and most of us die before we want to, how can you dismiss the individual who chooses to die on its own terms, and by its own hand?


So, she says, chewing on some rocket, What you're saying is that beneath our veneer of fake importance and the desperate need to validate everything we do, life is in fact meaningless? I do not know for a fact if life is meaningless or not. What I do know is that by assumption the converse of meaningless would be meaningful, and from that word you would extrapolate feelings of gratification, fulfillment and the hazy, linear feeling that we are all headed somewhere, for some significant reason and that all of this amounts to some great thing. And in that sense I can say while it may not be meaningless, it is far from being meaningful.  

all the wine

the following is inspired by the lyrics of the national and "not everyone's listening" by kristine



Virginia thinks this place is full of spies, thinks they could be on to her. Weaving between tables and chattering guests she soon discovers how to gracefully disappear in a room. To drown in the drone of conversation without communication, the expressions contorted into familiar smiles. To drown would be the worst way of dying for someone so claustrophobic. I'll drown when I see you.

She's been deluged with well wishes, were they real or were they just echoes which bounced inside her brain. She'll fight for her place at the table like girls fight for their place among boys. She'll run like she's awesome, totally geniuses, she'll run till hey love she gets away from it. She'll run till she's drunk and old and her hands are covered in cake but she swears she didn't have any.

I have weird memories of you, I have a ton of great ideas and I don't want to waste any. I want to dance around the nearest famous city middle where they hang their holiday rainbow lights in the garden. Our place at the table, this river's full of lost sharks. With our fingernails painted we'd watch as they snatch dolls from little boys and replace them with blue instead of pink. And they'd grow up beautiful and braided and cruel but still you'd say they weren't fucked over.

Chandeliers hang from the ceiling of the hall, like earrings on the guests below it. Virginia wonders how it all went the dull and wicked ordinary way. I'd break my arms around the one I love, I'd break my arms around my love. She'd put on her argyle sweater she'd put on a smile. Take her place at the table among boys, stay quiet and pretty and unpolitical and wait for her place at the table, a room of her own draped in yellow wallpaper. Watch as they'd piss on every tree, stick flags into things they do not own and say we were here, we were here.



I have weird memories of you, wearing long red socks and red shoes. I have weird memories of you and I think I'm like Tennessee Williams, I wait for the click but it doesn't kick in.