AGAINST MEMORY
A short essay for @mudede & @hugohouse
You’ve secretly taken everything from me. And after taking this immeasurable and vibrant wealth… you present it to me as a small package called mine, my memory.
You are the source of two incredible fabrications: solidity and self. Together they form a shackle linking and linking and linking…
I hate you, and I can’t be this self without you. You’ve taken everything from me and reduced it. You hand me a gem of polished opal mined from the vast, unfathomable, mountain of my existence… and say to me, “be dazzled by this tiny treasure in your hand.”
You are theft posing as charity. You rob me and become my family.
I remember my first gift from you. In accepting it I became this separate self and the world became not me. Later, even my body became not me, even my mind became not me.
In my first memory there was a flood. I was sitting in the back seat of our family car watching, beholding the power of the surging creek beginning to overtake the wooden bridge we drove over to our home. My mother was afraid and powerful in her fear. My father was calm and powerful in his calm. In truth, all I can say is that there was power.
I accept all of this memory, believe it as much as anything, yet there is another part of me that knows and has always known that I’ve been duped, that the power and vastness is not fully remembered. This knowing has surged forward in every radically new and rare experience, only to be reduced with accelerating frequency into memory.
I know there are miracles, powerful floods that overwhelm the known and command a pure awareness… and you’ve taken every one, polished them as gems.
In speaking to you thus, I hear you say, “here, I will give you more,” but it is not even close to enough. There is only one place you cannot reach me, and it is a place not in time, now, the ever cresting wave of being.
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Many thanks to @attadawahare for wrestling these thoughts with me!
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