Everyday is like Sunday
I'd like to be able to appreciate simple things.
I was laying in my bed at my parent's house on Sunday, dozing off in the sunlight, and a powerful breeze blew right into my room and over my face. In that moment, my brain did something weird. I felt like I was in a time warp. The thing about being in a half conscious state while in that room is that I sometimes forget who I am - what age I am, what I am feeling right then. I laid in that spot when I was a 5 year old kid trying to avoid cleaning my room. I laid there when I was 13 and starting high school, listening to the Pixies and Joy Divison, forming new interests in my head. I laid there on my breaks from California, absorbing the comfort of home, dreaming of the ocean 2000 miles away. It's easy to get lost in that cloud -- transport yourself back to a time which may now seem easier, but was just as intense when it was happening. Those moments make me think that I have a reset button in my head.
2 Comments:
A taste of madeline, deja vu, and you are transported back into those comfortable spaces in the corners of your memoryscape. You want to push reset, but you know it's a catch-22, and it makes you feel anxious, thinking of the contradiction between your desire for the reconciliation of all your past selves and your awareness that the person you have become has its being only through its becoming, through its differentiation from your past selves. Listening to the new Interpol cd (Proust's 'little phrase of Vinteul'), memories flood in that I just want to capture and walk around in, live in, re-live in these small things, re-play all the good times. But then I know there's only comfort in these feelings when I'm in them, and outside I see that it wasn't my feelings that made these times good, but what produced the feelings, mostly thinking about other people and my relationships with them. The memories created around these small things, that allow us to transport ourselves into our past, have such strong feelings associated with them because they were formed at times when we took breaks from relating with the people in our lives in order to aesthetically appraise those people and relationships in terms of the visual and aural circumstances surrounding them. These feelings and associated memoryscapes are keepsakes, frozen in time, ready to be reactivated by visual and aural reminders. It's fun to relive these feelings, but it makes me nervous to think about pushing reset, because to do so would be to ignore the fact that the relationships that were the basis for those feelings have completely changed. To hope to reset to the relationships that produced precisely those feelings is to forget that things have changed and to prevent the possibility of remaking new relationships in which new feelings could be produced. I'm not saying that it's not fun or a waste of time to relive the past, but I'm scared of getting stuck there. Writing seems to be the best way to work out anxieties, so the next time I have deja vu, I'm going to write a three thousand page book that explores all of the connections to the small things in my memories.
11:26 AM
Or not.
11:58 PM
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