"That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine"
Here's a song by Andrew Bird:
If memory serves us, then who owns the master
How do we know who's projecting this reel
And is it like gruel or like quick drying plaster
Tell me how long til the paint starts to peel
Is it like Pyramus or Apollo or an archer we don't know
Though history repeats itself, and time's a crooked bow
Come on tell us something we don't know
Now who's the best boy and the casting director
And the editor splicing your face from the scene
It's all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
They say all good things must come to an end
Everyday the night must fall
How it all came to this, I simply can't recall
Too many cooks in the kitchen
How the mighty must fall
As I look into my coming life as a lady who doesn't take care of kids, I feel drawn to my past, reminiscing. Little moments from twenty years ago pop into my head, yet at the same time, I've been watching my past - my past being what I remember of the view from inside my mind and behind my eyes - erode. There are things I used to remember, like the names of my grade school teachers and people I knew in high school, that have disappeared. I take down the box labeled "Grade School Teachers," and it is empty.
Sometimes I start to tell a story and then realize I am confounding two experiences, because it doesn't make sense the way I remember it, like something that happened at Christmas but involved fresh cherries from our tree. But I can't separate them again because I haven't got the necessary information.
But this: I kept a diary from age 13 until I got married at age 33. After that it was spotty, and soon after that, I started keeping baby books, which were sometimes full of lies because they were for the kids to read later. Then nothing from 1996 or so until 2004, when I met LiveJournal. But that first, twenty-year, set is sealed in cardboard boxes in our attic. I haven't looked at them since I was in my late twenties, which is to say, while I was still keeping them. I'm afraid to look at them, because I suspect that the first trip through will be like Proust's madeleine, a rush of remembering.* But after that, it will begin again to erode and I will remember reading and remembering, not the original remembering, and the forgetting, embellishing, lying machine will start up. Better to save them, to wait for the right time, and in the meantime, to forget.
*Also, I have a box of letters and cards that I sent to my parents that they saved. I looked into them once and it made me feel sick in a horrible way. Because what I saw was my entirely false determination to make them into a certain kind of happy, functional family by acting as if that was what was happening. And it was not.
If memory serves us, then who owns the master
How do we know who's projecting this reel
And is it like gruel or like quick drying plaster
Tell me how long til the paint starts to peel
Is it like Pyramus or Apollo or an archer we don't know
Though history repeats itself, and time's a crooked bow
Come on tell us something we don't know
Now who's the best boy and the casting director
And the editor splicing your face from the scene
It's all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
They say all good things must come to an end
Everyday the night must fall
How it all came to this, I simply can't recall
Too many cooks in the kitchen
How the mighty must fall
As I look into my coming life as a lady who doesn't take care of kids, I feel drawn to my past, reminiscing. Little moments from twenty years ago pop into my head, yet at the same time, I've been watching my past - my past being what I remember of the view from inside my mind and behind my eyes - erode. There are things I used to remember, like the names of my grade school teachers and people I knew in high school, that have disappeared. I take down the box labeled "Grade School Teachers," and it is empty.
Sometimes I start to tell a story and then realize I am confounding two experiences, because it doesn't make sense the way I remember it, like something that happened at Christmas but involved fresh cherries from our tree. But I can't separate them again because I haven't got the necessary information.
But this: I kept a diary from age 13 until I got married at age 33. After that it was spotty, and soon after that, I started keeping baby books, which were sometimes full of lies because they were for the kids to read later. Then nothing from 1996 or so until 2004, when I met LiveJournal. But that first, twenty-year, set is sealed in cardboard boxes in our attic. I haven't looked at them since I was in my late twenties, which is to say, while I was still keeping them. I'm afraid to look at them, because I suspect that the first trip through will be like Proust's madeleine, a rush of remembering.* But after that, it will begin again to erode and I will remember reading and remembering, not the original remembering, and the forgetting, embellishing, lying machine will start up. Better to save them, to wait for the right time, and in the meantime, to forget.
*Also, I have a box of letters and cards that I sent to my parents that they saved. I looked into them once and it made me feel sick in a horrible way. Because what I saw was my entirely false determination to make them into a certain kind of happy, functional family by acting as if that was what was happening. And it was not.