Sets and Probabilities [Notation: remembered]

by Jill Darling

I.

One asks, “what is the limit of one’s own history?” Another responds “that is up to one, entirely.”

Determine what one means by memory. As in, whose memory is this? I remember, you remember, she he it (the fossil has nostalgia for the sea) remembers.

Place an index finger at the immediate start of present, the space of pure perception. Travel north along the cone (north with a touch of east I assume, as the cone’s line slants outward) through the various reservoirs of remembered things. Arrive at the opening of pure memory, the place of dreams, of distinctive recollections. It is a place of virtual reality, as in, “it is virtually real to me,” as in “I have been here before yet it is no longer now.” Along the way take a photo of every single instant. You have created yourself again, or still, or because of.

In the knife-edge theory of time only the present exists. One point moves instantly into the next.

What becomes of one’s own history as it moves further into, further beyond? If our perceptions are partial, in the first place, what is said then about the second place? How many places constitute story (told by whom? claimed by whom?)? Who determines the opening and closing of doors of snapshots of image of the etcetera.

If one is stuck in molasses, nothing new ever happens.

A man on the street said he had worked for Nixon. Why not I said, were you a secret agent? Of course, he said, of course. He pushes a cart along through a spring drizzle, pushes everything he owns. From which reservoir does he retrieve his history? What was it like to know Nixon, I ask? What, he asks back.

Among others, some think time moves from the past through the present and into the future. Saddleback style. These are the epochs of our lives, each with distinctions based on novelty, as in, when something interesting happens, time moves.

I select. I reconstruct. Language is made of universals. One word builds upon another. For millennia. Proust wrote seven volumes. His reservoirs had known rain for many years.

II.

Something happens. Something else happened once before. To me to another and on. Sometimes I forget the circumstances. Sometimes I control the chaos of detail. Sometimes I spell my name backward, just to make sure.

One minute over another. Space equals which day you prefer. (Asking your immediate opinion.) Relative to what happens next. Wait constantly and let me know, please, before the rain comes back.

How does one decide in an instant, that is, to sacrifice. Give up cheese. Give up red sweets. Give up a blood relation. What happens in the sky on a Saturday, for example, to send one following a blade. As in “I imagined I had cut your limbs.” As in, “I apologize for my temporary…” (regardless, another might argue, for it falls within an instant and every instant counts) “…my…tell me, where was I when we shared that moment?”

Nothing really shared at all. An instant changes from one to the next. You were on the swing while I drew lines on the concrete. The wind sends her second hand moving even more rapidly. At 12:00. At 3:00. At 9:02. On which day did we drink tea? And can you recall the flavor?

There is a gap between experience and its physiological correlates.

Are you sure what you did yesterday was really you? I only know about my favorite blue shoes from the pictures. One album filled with those shoes. Someone tells the story and my memory is created. Someone tells another story and people begin to follow Jesus, or this is an example of movement, the interaction of matter and action. The substance of perception. Is the table really a table, if it is only Monday?

III.

The sudden brief early morning breeze and again i am taken back, years before, an island far from relatives. A first knowledge of coconut palms. How the coolest part of the day is at 5 am, before the sun. How, some days, driving the circumference of the island in only hours, wondering how cowgirls felt surrounded by land, wondering, if here someone ever gets into a boat and just begins to row.

Remembering sand put to music, a sky as big as the ocean. Thinking, it has been how many instants since any recording of that place. Meaning, whose story is ever-changing, unfolding photos of someone else’s time. Meaning, how to create the voice-over for still images. Trying to mean, every word cannot be placed in its own order.

Every time I floss I hear you in my head.

The reconstitution of single parts of time. Or, I hear only bits of conversation now, imagine the rest in the future tense.

In high school you scented each of your letters. Sometimes the smell in the air and yet you are years away, spread over miles. We could never agree on the same names.

Somehow reaching a particular age and taking a survey: are you content? what color would you have chosen on this date three years ago? describe your favorite moment of the middle of the night. do you feel that you can accurately taste the lines on the back of your hand, the lines where you carry your stories? tell me what you are feeling at this same hour in one week.

Three sisters sit around a fire. One says: the day we moved all of the furniture out of the smallest bedroom. Another adds: it was a Thursday. The third says: not a Thursday and we left the lamp in its place. One says: there was no lamp. Someone replies: where did we put it all if not in the rain? Another states: or was it winter? And again: but mother was never home on Thursdays at that time. And another: it can be said, in any case, that trust was lost at that moment.

Suddenly I am remembering how you used to iron every one of your t-shirts. The only shirts you owned. Clean and pressed, they kept you proud. I ate chicken for you.

moments are no longer so colored

Thinking of a project in which we compared newspapers. Each paper contained different stories starring the same characters. Even in 1943 there were discrepancies. What if we talked to people today, about those characters? What point would that prove?

Regardless of perspective, blood was shed.

Once, upon arising at 5 am, I knew exactly what I had to do. In the breezes of that time I held claustrophobia at bay, ran fast up and down deserted roads, imagined minutes weaving with the taste of salted fish, the taste of never-ending present, each instant carving its own trajectory.

All I said was “mahal na malhal kita” and you were silent on the other end of the line. But we could never have met in the middle. Precipitation extending every mile of the sea.

This is all that is left.

IV.

He is trying to relive the past and determine the future, thinking he has some great advantage, as in “oh yes, I understand each moment of next week, precisely.” He imagines it was so much better, when, waking in the night to find insects on his eyelids.

He knows the current running past carries him with it.

Lightning shears a branch from a tree. The tree remembers better days. The storm threatening to change each of the gathered instants. Each instant carving messages into itself.

That is the point, hardly clear until written down. I only remember it after reading it again. I have recorded my history, now I know exactly what happened on that particular day in 1984. Exactly.

Setting down a wet paintbrush and walking away may alter history irrevocably. Learning to dance salsa, on the other hand.

The obvious analogy is with music.

He found himself lying in the shape of a deer in the snow retracing the deer’s movements listening to the wonderings of the deer.

Morning shadows are blue in snow.

Sometimes I return to the same place, and find, I am not the same at all. It has taken my mother 28 years to realize I never liked trisquits. It’s my sister who likes cornbread and trisquits and when we tell stories we argue. Each time I go home my hair is the same, yet each time someone notices the difference.

How many rivers have you stepped in?

V.

Time may be reversible.

Time is a Rorschack folded into a Möbius strip turned inside out.

Yesterday, it seems, never occurred. I am still living last Tuesday.

I never wear a watch, yet somehow, I am always the one people stop and ask.

Every time I look back at the crossed out words I still know exactly what they say.

Each mark was a gesture toward the future.

You insisted “don’t tell me what time it is.” You were enjoying the suspension of real life and I was less eager to return. I only know months have passed because the events from those days are more fragmented constantly, fractals of images of the dirt and the heat and the planes flying overhead.

One cannot be a circus performer forever, apparently.

VI.

Past and present merge, reality appears in half-forgotten experiences.

Whose forgotten experiences? Which walking through present time always afflicted by what cannot be recalled. I know yesterday I put on my shoes, but at what time? Someone tells a story. I don’t remember place nor main character, only that a peripheral child was bit by a snake.

If I write this down does it by default become my history?

Shifting and confused gusts of memory.

That scent. Thinking you had passed, were passing, waiting around the corner. All these years later. One letter after another. Sent. Scented. In red ink.

I am telling a story every time. Include this detail. Every detail. Constantly becoming.

There is no past b/c no one else remembers it.

What can and cannot be recorded instantly. What can and cannot be historical fact.

Whose history is this? Instant by instant. Slipping. Shifting claim.

This autobiography of expansive sensations divided horizontally.

Other than knife-edge instants of action.

Other than, move forward, progress, chro-no-loge (verb-form).

Other than, this singular experience (related)(recorded).

Notes:

some quotes taken from:
Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
Chris Offut’s The Same River Twice

© Jill Darling. All rights reserved.