Thursday, November 27, 2008

Memory Gardens

Sometimes you come across something so appropriate to your current circumstance that it strikes you in such a way as to imprint itself on your mind. Something you must return to over and over again, in reference to all points of your life. Seconds ago I opened up my copy of the second issue of the St. Petersburg Review for some good reading while waiting for my friend, and decided to re-read the essay by Arkadii Dragomoschenko, entitled 'Memory Gardens'. I love Dragomoschenko's work, and have had a wonderful conversation with him this past summer, and so always enjoy reading whatever I can of his, for the first, second, or even third time. Though I had read it before, the opening of this essay had a particular effect on me now because of the events in my life in the past two weeks.
Sometimes a few encounters, no matter how long or intensive, in the end form something like a ghostly constellation that owes its linguistic content, the valence of its anticipations, its mutually substituting intentions - in a word, the laws of its existence - not so much to chronologically distributed facts or neuroleptic recollections of certain attendant, contextual circumstances as to the logic of an unforeseeable ("future") exchange of that which can be rightfully called "generative possibilities": they open to the imagination - but not all to the permanence of memory - in forms that are ungraspable yet anticipate unimaginable perfection.
In certain other regions of discourse, these possibilities are sometimes called "desire," which lends some vague value to the clarity of forestalling. The influence of such interactions is unpredictable. Sometimes such encounters happen in life.
Is it too much for me to hope that the confusing and absurd encounters I have had with one specific person in the past two weeks can come anywhere near this idea of an influential, generative, ghostly constellation of interactions?

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