Inhabitable imaginary

I've started this blog selfishly. It's not for anyone but me. In fact, and maybe this is just the essence of blogging, it's all about me. And maybe that's why I'm doing it--to carve out a little space. A place, in my life of chaos and noise that's just for me to be quiet and still and try to think. A space for me to remember.

There are so many things I want to remember. And this speaks, more than anything, to what I've lost. We don't need to remember things that are still with us. Memory is the habitat of the lost. It is the frontier of longing and regretting and wishing. Partly because the trail of our past is responsible for our present. Partly because we long for time to stop and in memory, if only for a moment, we can inhabit the past. The time before time moved on.

Memory. In a word, this is what interests me more than anything. Memory recalls what has happened. Yet, it is not static but dynamic in nature. It can change. It can be wrong. It can become more complete later. It is three dimensional. Maybe four dimensional. When we remember something as we experienced it, that is one thing. That is as if what we experienced was filmed as through our eyes. We are limited by that viewpoint. Then, perhaps, someone else tells us what they remember of the same event, and suddenly we have greater dimension. We see more clearly--we can be outside of ourselves.

I remembered so clearly my wedding. It was beautiful and tender and intimate and we followed it with a five week honeymoon in Europe. And the whole time we had such fun remembering the moments and the beauty and talking about what we had loved. And then we arrived home and we received the wedding photos. And suddenly, my memory of the wedding was replaced with a third person narrative of what it had looked like. I now can't remember any of it except what was photographed. So that my memory of our vows is no longer what I saw at the moment--the blinding nimbus of sun haloing Gordon's face--but an image of him and me standing aglow in the late afternoon sun. My memory now includes me--an image of me. Surreal.

And so memory--changing, grappling, rethinking the past--is important to me. Conceptually I'm intrigued by it. Emotionally I am pulled by it. Romantically I am moved by it. And it is even more interesting when connected to space. Every memory is clearly tied to the place of it's inception. Yet it is also connected to the physical space of each place it has been remembered from. So that as I type this now, I am both in the place where I first realized this, as well as walking along the path at Alamo Square park where I often thought about it, and also sitting at my computer in our old apartment in San Francisco where I first began writing about memory. In fact, we are transported to the space of memory. It is inhabitable. It is imaginary.

It is the purpose of this blog to be a total freedom for me. A space to write, and to be, and to relax without strictures. It is my own inhabitable imagined space.