Memory is a coordinating system. When you start losing your memory, you lose the coordinates of your mapping system, the one inside your mind that helps you negotiate all the terrains from the past to the present to the expectancies of the future. A coordinating system that is multi-dimensional, composed of inner and outer landscapes. Whose latitudes and longtidues are strands of narratives composed of interpretations of memories. Memory: what repeats itself. If a coordinate is touched, awakens, it opens out that area of the map and all the strands of narratives connected to it. Until it falls apart, senility, dementia, Alzeimer's, stroke, aneurysm, until the memories slip off the narratives like beads tumbling off a broken necklace.
She's lost the narrative of the streets. She can't remember where she lives, or the directions home. She thinks buildings long gone are still there. She can't remember what she said five minutes ago. What was a finely woven grid of electro-chemical impulses is sagging in places, torn, drifting, unable to complete its circuitry. Memory is unravelling and so is identity. But in a fog of forgetfulness that releases her.
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At some point I stopped writing inspirational posts and let the deeper images emerge. My writing continues to deepen, at least I feel as if I'm diving into my undercurrents as I explore difficult terrain without covering it over with glossy patinas. Or perhaps I still do. Who knows? I let the images emerge whole and just polish them a bit in the grammar and in the ways that the metaphors are constructed. This piece is about my mother. It's a very difficult situation.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Dear Brenda,
ReplyDeleteOur CEO, who taught me a lot of what I know about the electrical industry in the past 20 years, is now 85 years old, and still arrives for work earlier than most of his employees, and leaves later. He has been quite lucid up till recently, and it seems dementia is creeping up on him at last. I lost my parents when I was a young man, and it almost seems hard hearted to say, but I'm almost glad that my memories of them will always be of what they were like in their early 50s. I won't see them deteriorate, like a lot of my friends and peers in my age group are now experiencing.
My prayers go out to your Mom, and to you. Hope your new projects are all satisfying, and I know they will be exceedingly artistic.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
{{{Hugs}}}
ReplyDeleteMy heart goes out to you and your mother. I wish you both strength.
Michael, thank you, she's become more & more frail through the years, and it is hard to see the decline in mental capacities now. But my mother has also been very painful for me, and I am now seeing another side of her - she's actually become 'nice,' 'sweet,' in her 'lostness,' things I never experienced with her before...
ReplyDeletee_journeys, thank you.