things not remembered

this was not written on the day, but on the day before, after watching Sans soleil for the second time and feeling the sadness wash over me. i am left with the knowledge that nothing worth saying can be said, that every image lies.

a morning i do not remember

if ten people were to read this tonight, it wouldn't make any difference. if i chose three friends, three strangers, my mother, my father, my lover - who would come the closest to hearing the space surrounding the letters?

a day i do not remember

memory functions only in absence, snapshots surrounded by the void. we draw imaginary li(n)es connecting A to B. i see me with my grandfather at age two, and crying on the first day of school at age five. i cannot help but draw a trajectory between them.

and yet, i do not truly know the location of either. they are merely two locations, adjacent exhibits in the museum of my memory, but separated by three years in the ocean of time. i can account for neither their proximity nor distance.

image from Chris Marker's Sans soleil

i started the film looking for something to write about, something academic, and left it realizing there was no point. even if i wrote an essay and filled it with 4500-6000 of les mots justes, it would still be absent of meaning. this is the tragic, inescapable double-bind of language.

by morning these feelings will be gone and still the words will remain. a page full of tombstones to the me i was the night before. film is no different. each frame is a eulogy, every splice its own purgatory. i recall the images of myself that exist not in memory, but only in the artifact:

a night i do not remember

Marker's Tokyo is gone; Hitchcock's San Francisco has been overtaken by artist and muse. my own film has grown so thin that i can see the shadows lurking the closets of our eyes. i listen for cadences;
my lover is snoring with a yellow blanket pulled across her face.

image from Alfred Hitchcock's Veritgo

there is a rhythm to our collective blinking, and one can count the worlds that might have been in the moments our eyes are closed. the average person blinks 15 times per minute. there are more than 6.5 billion people in this world. the seductive deception of arithmetic leads me to believe that there are nearly 100 trillion chances for revolution every minute.

but none of this matters. the gulf between experience and memory has already grown too large, and by morning all this will be gone. i will be asleep within the hour and know that all those revolutions, all those worlds that might have been, may only arrive in my sleep:

a dream i do not remember