Deprive of by deceit.
I have been thinking about the history of the universe, the history of our planet, and the histories of all interdependent globes (planetary and earthly) whose revolutions rely on those of others.
How, I want to know, does history treat the floatation of human memory, flirtations of recall adroitly omitted from routine accounts of our selves, gently edited out of our attempts to structure our own reputation?
Is it the responsibility of the memory-holder, of the individual in charge of these units of record, to make these ephemera indexable, searchable, inheritable? Connectable.
These flashes of memory float in the oceans of time, lingering with material stubbornness and inaccessibility, depriving other lost memories the chance to connect, the opportunity to resolve mysteries unknown to each other.
This infinite matter passed through the morning jumble of my mind, during my wake-up conversation-with-self in which I imagine myself closing the open ends of a puzzling line of questions, in which I imagine myself sealing a discussion roiled with inexplicable vagaries and residual blossoming conspiracies. I, in my continuation of the dream state, felt that spark of genius which connects the unconnectable, only to wake up completely and rediscover how the genius of the dream state is often nothing but a dull thud of wit to the wakened mind.
It reminded me of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, "A Treatise on Poetry", from 1957, which contains these verses which impressed me to golly. This is from Part III, which is called "The Spirit of History", and it depicts history itself traveling through the infinite ephemera and un-recorded experiences and events of our planet.
— "King of the centuries, ungraspable Movement,
You who fill the grottoes of the ocean
With a roiling silence, who dwell in the blood
Of the gored shark devoured by other sharks,
In the whistle of a half-bird, half-fish,
In the thundering sea, in the iron gurgling
Of the rocks when archipelagoes surge up.
"The churning of your surf casts up bracelets,
Pearls not eyes, bones from which the salt
Has eaten crowns and dresses of brocade.
You without beginning, you always between
A form and a form, O stream, bright spark,
Antithesis that ripens toward a thesis,
Now we have become equal to the gods,
Knowing, in you, that we do not exist.
"You, in whom cause is married to effect,
Drew us from the depth as you draw a wave,
For one instant, limitless, of transformation.
You have shown us the agony of this age
So that we could ascend to those heights
Where your hand commands the instruments.
Spare us, do not punish us. Our offense
Was grave: we forgot the power of your law.
Save us from ignorance. Accept now our devotion."
Milosz next refers to undocumented history as "the possessions of time" and captures what I, for one, feel is the ceaseless, continuous escape of experience into the limitlessness of time.
