From Vestiges_05: Lacunae
“Forgetting is the primordial divinity, the venerable ancestor and the first presence of what, in a later generation, will give rise to Mnemosyne, mother of the muses. The essence of memory is therefore forgetting; the forgetfulness of which one must drink in order to die.”
—Blanchot
“In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion.”
—Lyn Hejinian
I return from a long absence, I return abundantly to the betrayal of words. The treason of my flights resumes as I announce myself a runaway, delighting in the gap of transit, the blush of ended encounters. The absence was not silent, neither completely void, but supplied with forgotten evidence, forgotten defeat, a gale of the seen unceasing. All of time is after; we reside in after-wards.
[Having left, until existence answered. The emptiness thrived as I was fugitive, intermediate, alive only to recurred nocturnal traverses. The forgotten whirled violently, would not be forgot without apology, it tasted so sour upon my tongue. I return embittered, disillusioned, to the impotently memorized.]
When I was gone, memory verified and restored my lack, now it builds remorse of my present wherein I dig ravishing cavities, pace uprooted earth. I heard echoes weeping like a cataract cascading into dark apertures. The echoes were not hollow, but charged wave arrangements of stored beliefs time was renouncing.
Dispersed in the darkness, journeying past through the absence, I beat memory into appearance, made possible by its mystification, by de-stemming epistemologies. I drink it all—atoms and suns. I burn speechless in the swallows. I take a breath; in every respired pause time erupts apart.
[Memory, iridescently motherless. Memory, my incandescent avalanche. Memory, the attrition of my piety. Memory, you have made a widow of me.]
I write the night of me. Life is one long memorial. We died in life, we die just a little each time, but these deaths are replenishing. To forget is to say progressively less, to repeat forgetfulness always involves saying more. I excavate at the risk of living, the peril of cumulative weathering, occupied by the business of rendering breaches. How will I be remembered? For my corruption? For my cowardice? For my seething? For my mutinies? Adorn my ditch with wild bouquets that dream of having once been seed. Give me the carnage of carnations self-wilting. The language of memory is one which languishes.
Looking back, we die away from the present, we are strangers to ourselves. To look back, to die and refute time, is the action to which we finally become one with others. The gap: an emptiness and an opening.
—Jared Daniel Fagen
June 2020
Arkville, New York