“I think in Western literature, it’s common to other the supernatural. Even naming it the “supernatural” is a form of othering it, of establishing the boundaries of what reality is or should be. “Who gets to say what’s real,” and “for whom is it real?” are always questions that I’m asking. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts being a last resort. The living won’t fight for us, and the living have failed us in so many ways. But the dead, the dead won’t. This collective history that we draw upon won’t fail us, and it’s the one thing that won’t if you’re surrounded by failure and apocalypse and collapse. That’s something I remember the elders in my family telling me: don’t pray to some deity or some higher being, pray to your dead because they’re the only ones who will listen. We don’t have the ability to summon these kinds of deities in any way. But we have this shared history, this tapestry of voices and stories that we’re constantly weaving. That’s one thing that you can always have.”
this is the passage in crying in h-mart that gets me the most
“Memory exists as a kind of spatiotemporal entity, because time, memory, and land are woven together. One cannot look at the Grand Canyon without conjuring the deep time needed to create it. We drive past restaurants, and maybe we remember that one time that thing happened. I grow weary of the word “spatial,” because I am more interested in the idea of a terrestrial-temporal matrix. I call this terra-temporal matrix the “memory field” because of memory’s unique engagement with time and land. Time is terrestial and feeds our cognitive development and relationship to the universe itself. The word “terrestrial” also grows heavy; it has similarities with words like “sublunary,” which place the terrestrial opposite a religious or spiritual space. The word “temporal” isn’t adequate either. The memory field is a matrix of time, memory, and land. Land’s connection to time feeds our development as human beings, and understanding this connection strengthens our relationship to the universe itself.”
— Jake Skeets, “The Memory Field”
Joan Didion, from Blue Nights
Nicole W. Lee, from "Even the Dust"
“Colonialism tried to control the memory of the colonized; or, rather, in the words of Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, it tried to subject the colonized to its memory, to make the colonized see themselves through the hegemonic memory of the colonizing center. Put another way, the colonizing presence sought to induce a historical amnesia on the colonized by mutilating the memory of the colonized; and where that failed, it dismembered it, and then tried to re-member it to the colonizer’s memory—to his way of defining the world, including his take on the nature of the relations between colonizer and colonized.”
— NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O - SOMETHING TORN AND NEW (via bilqisofsheba)
Ibrahim Muhawi, introduction to Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 [ID'd]
"But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory's fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson's last words (in a letter). A woman whom everyone thought of as a shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was."
— Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
shoutout to people who process their trauma by fetishizing it, big ups to twisting the worst things that happened to us into a source of pleasure, confronting the plasticine and ever evolving nature of memory and imagination ftw
Is that... healthy?
i'm happier than i've ever been
“Memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished, and contemplated, or they can flitter just out of reach, like lost threads of broken webs. To remember is to have two selves, one in the memory, one thinking about the memory, but the two are not precisely distinct, and separating them can be dizzying.”
— A. S. Byatt, introduction to Memory: An Anthology
“Memory exists as a kind of spatiotemporal entity, because time, memory, and land are woven together. One cannot look at the Grand Canyon without conjuring the deep time needed to create it. We drive past restaurants, and maybe we remember that one time that thing happened. I grow weary of the word “spatial,” because I am more interested in the idea of a terrestrial-temporal matrix. I call this terra-temporal matrix the “memory field” because of memory’s unique engagement with time and land. Time is terrestial and feeds our cognitive development and relationship to the universe itself. The word “terrestrial” also grows heavy; it has similarities with words like “sublunary,” which place the terrestrial opposite a religious or spiritual space. The word “temporal” isn’t adequate either. The memory field is a matrix of time, memory, and land. Land’s connection to time feeds our development as human beings, and understanding this connection strengthens our relationship to the universe itself.”
— Jake Skeets, “The Memory Field”
Crazy how we are everything that has happened to us but then you meet someone and you don’t see everything that has happened to them you just see them. And you both try to explain everything that has happened to you but your words and memories are so biased and oversimplified.
“I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back [to my hometown]. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessing. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.”
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternate Endings
there is no unlived life or alternative reality where everything went right…. there is only here and now what are you going to do with it
anne carson wrote beautifully about this: “i’m not saying move back towards life, i’m saying the future isn’t elsewhere. we’re locked in a spaceship, h of h, we have nothing but continuing.”