The Untenable Search for Permanance
Reading medieval literature is often an exercise in frustration - these tiny glimpses into the minds of the past, and all they can talk about is religion! I suppose it says something about them, but there's little individualistic in it, and Christian theology is far from a lost art.
Then I was reading about epitaphs and tombs, and the tiny hints they give as to the lives encased within, and it occurred to me: when we choose how to be remembered, we are anything but daring. The expected and the dignified are, well, boring.
Almost makes me want to commission a tombstone that says: She had great sex.
I digress... Back when few had the luxury of recording their thoughts, when books were themselves as rare as a home theatre system with built-in jacuzzi, people were careful what they put down. Moral lessons came first. I get that. The oldest prose and poems we find aren't fiction - they aren't even the king-making history myths - they're instructional songs like "Thirty Days Hath November". Practicality must come before art.
But what we hunger for is more than that. Or at least *I* hunger for more than that. I want the world to know things I've seen. I feel a strong need to set them down so they will not be lost: the zig-zag ice lattice on a chain link fence in February, the way my grandmother laughed when she wasn't sure if she got the joke, eyes shifting and unsure, a rusted truck in the forest, the way it felt to eat cheese and bread on a cold camping morning.
And the truth is - none of this can be conveyed, not in its entirety. But it makes me want to write something about not being able to write something, if that makes sense. Even if it's just a list of random people's "What I want to contribute to posterity's consciousness."
Oo... yeah, like a science fiction thing, where every citizen gets to deposit one memory? I mean, because of space considerations... yeah. Think I'll go write that.
Then I was reading about epitaphs and tombs, and the tiny hints they give as to the lives encased within, and it occurred to me: when we choose how to be remembered, we are anything but daring. The expected and the dignified are, well, boring.
Almost makes me want to commission a tombstone that says: She had great sex.
I digress... Back when few had the luxury of recording their thoughts, when books were themselves as rare as a home theatre system with built-in jacuzzi, people were careful what they put down. Moral lessons came first. I get that. The oldest prose and poems we find aren't fiction - they aren't even the king-making history myths - they're instructional songs like "Thirty Days Hath November". Practicality must come before art.
But what we hunger for is more than that. Or at least *I* hunger for more than that. I want the world to know things I've seen. I feel a strong need to set them down so they will not be lost: the zig-zag ice lattice on a chain link fence in February, the way my grandmother laughed when she wasn't sure if she got the joke, eyes shifting and unsure, a rusted truck in the forest, the way it felt to eat cheese and bread on a cold camping morning.
And the truth is - none of this can be conveyed, not in its entirety. But it makes me want to write something about not being able to write something, if that makes sense. Even if it's just a list of random people's "What I want to contribute to posterity's consciousness."
Oo... yeah, like a science fiction thing, where every citizen gets to deposit one memory? I mean, because of space considerations... yeah. Think I'll go write that.