“If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair.”
Franz Kafka
He was continually fretting over memory, being assaulted by memory, waylaid, seduced, suffocated by it, by the endless parade of sepia toned images, as if from out of a shoebox of polaroids, all the cards, images, film snippets being misplaced, stuck in the box willy-nilly as it were, a vast but finite, definitely finite, set but wherein some secret, some punctum as Barthes once had it, something which secretly stood out (if such a think be possible; well, maybe like the purloined letter, a secret out in the open) but all the pieces don’t fit…and ESPECIALLY perplexing when he tries to cross-chek his memory with some one’s who was present at the same event…”nope, don’t remember that” “nope not sure that happened” “nope I wasn’t there” it’s like memories other was not forgetting but, contingently speaking, another memory…or maybe time itself, curling back over the breakers of life, splashing and distorting all the figures, including Foucault’s famous human face, etched into the sand and then washed away leaving a blank slate for the next guest, but the thing with memory (and time) being that it is never totally washed away, even if the memories have been mis-labled, the bulldog that bit me on teh butt, the rock upside my head thrown by DH, grandpa’s carriage coming down the old road in front of the house, bucking and tossing him out, me and my little posse getting waylaid on old Deemer Rd, much to the delight of Pegleg Johnson who threatens us waving a stick after, a while we make it out to grandma’s old farmhouse and had big slabs of yellow cornbread with butter and on and on battered stormed with images much like the ‘Mandela Effect’ online where memories are getting called into question because because of slippage from/of/into alternate universes of memory and life. ok almost anything seems conceivable these days.