Thursday, April 17, 2008

we are born to forget,
and the annihilation of memory happens at the future time of death.
The complete negation.
Death, as Levinas puts it, is "ungraspable" and comes at me as such, outside my possibilities, which always comes to take me against my will, too soon.
While there can be instances that death can be willed, one cannot deny the confirmation that death brings: always a premature end because we can never know the future of a person who no longer lives.
Hence, my emphasis is on the future. A mystery of the future. At least for now, as I consider what is my relation to my Other; the other who I have yet to know and will come to know - my own subjectivity of my alterity (who I am not yet.)
But too soon, do we forget the things we once lived with. The things that we grew up with and eventually disappeared. And time became events and events became pockets of memories. And pockets become lacunae.
I am, thus, ready to forget. because that is always what I am more capable of. I will not let my remembrance ruin the perfect understanding that is unique to the moment of experience and immediate retrospect.
And indeed, I am forgetting. I am remembering.
they can be the same cognitive process. And they can also be entirely different, but they always happen at the same time.

While determining them, I am always re-engaging with my memory, my solitude, shut up within the captivity of my identity/ies. I am both hypostatized by insisting on my solitude, but I am always projecting my future (death); always leaping and moving in ways unimaginable. And I am incapable of removing this dilemma.

Hence, my melancholy/pleasure rests on this dilemma. The paradoxical relationship of my fundamental choice of achieving totality (living my life in an identifiable existent) and my existence in flux, in shifting identities and inconsistent micro-narratives of conflicts, contestations and correlations; my beings so to speak. I am looking at myself as a consistent entity as well as resisting myself by engaging in the fragmentary alterity that will perpetually mystify myself, such that I cannot rest alone - I rest and not rest both at the same time.

The joy of such an arrangement is that life is more than just stages of life, it is stages of life all colliding at random points of time.
It is to fall so madly in love and then the next moment laugh critically at such a foolish emotion.
It is to agree that this film is so great; if only it did this or that irrationally.

It is really about living life similarly as it has always been linearly as well as to live differently.
Hence, inevitably, I have to forget the past (at this stage) in order to be who I am in the future.
I have to remember the past in order to be who I am in the future.
It is such a radical dilemma.




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