The Inkstain
A boy who didn't love me back gave away a shirt with an inkstain from eighteen years earlier. I wore the shirt and the stain faded and disappeared by the end of summer—it was a miracle. I kept wearing the shirt and eventually forgot its significance, and on every birthday I grew less worried that I might forget to grow older. Like everything you remember, the anticipation of growing is lost steadily but incompletely. It goes slowly, and when the great miracles come you fail to recognize them. - Sarah Manguso (2012)
Manguso's poem wandered into my week, just when I was thinking about memory and desire. Which comes first? Our memory of desire or our desire for memory? Does desire stem from a memory? Does remembrance become desire?
Last night, I stumbled across Coda, a poignant animated short about Death, a soul pleads for the Grim Reaper to show him "more, more, more".
"Show me many things, so that I remember," said the lost soul. When we are alive, we seek to be remembered when we have passed. This film touches on the idea that when we are dying, perhaps we seek to remember all that has passed. As if our souls can take those memories with us.
Time is a double-edged sword for memory and desire. It takes time to build both within our minds. Yet time also erodes both, like the waves corroding the cliffs of the Jurassic coastlines. The saying goes "time heals all wounds". I translate it as time wearing down desire and memory, both of which can cause us pain.
As a thinker, I don't mind the eventual decay of my desire. Like Manguso, I don't mind losing the significance of a lost love's t-shirt. What I fear is the loss of memory, the loss of intellect, while others may hold desire dearer.
But can we actually choose what we remember as we lay dying? Whether they be all our lost desires or all our lost memories? Would we want to? Or would it be easier to let them both go?
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