memory

my brother and I at what ages? three and six? standing in front of one of those vivid memories...the times i have remembered this shot, of a huge croc mouth, eating red red meat...and then these pictures, a certain proof of memory...

that somehow memory must be proved? That something of sanity comes in realism? if it existed, if memory is accurate? Then...then all is okay? as if accuracy is useful, except that how else to make sense of memory. did this happen? Did I really see a huge croc gobble down meat as an early memory? Why should it matter?

And yet, having returned to that place, the relief, the comfort of memory confirmed, of re-membering. even if that nebulous territory of identity can never include an african sense of self...there remains an african sense of self...

that which cannot be named.

i remain curious about memory disrupted; it means something of a disruption of a certain perspective on entitlement. at the moment at which, all that is familiar is lost, what remains?

what is written over?

maybe riches are lost, maybe wealth is gained, maybe the new landscape is much better, but how one interprets that new space, has much to do with how one perceives the break...that moment when reality fragments...

i think of those disruptions that happen in families--a father suddenly falls apart with a house burning to the ground, or a kid's reality shifts radically with parents divorcing, or something happens that marks a before and after moment. before this was...a sense of belonging that remained stable. After this was, a slow steady constrution of reality that would appear, again, to be stable?

how to make sense of those moments of disruption?

formative life events, some would call them...those moments when one realizes the ways in which safety is constructed...

if one travels to south africa, if one sees for the first time the kinds of poverty that are so apparent that one couldn't ignore them, and then one returns to the states and starts to see that poverty more clearly here, how might one struggle to make sense of a life, of what it means to live ethically?

is it worse for that life formative event to happen at older ages? In one's fifties? or in one's childhood? or at twenty something...

join the peace corps?

but memory. memory. that image of cape of good hope, of george's danger moment...of the irony of that name...cape of good danger...the wave rises, we watch the spray, the oblivious person out on the rock, the moment before, the moment after the spray/water washes over the rock, taking the tiny figure down. the gasps, the figure re-emerging, our relief. good hope..

Posted by theorythis at August 24, 2004 09:36 AM