#162

Seared my right wrist down low and to the outside against the edge of a hot pan a while ago. Still open, peeling, occasionally suppurating scab in the center of it. Two days ago the corner of a hot tray pressed into my left bicep high up and to the inside. The worst part about taking an induction burn like that is the pressure aspect, where you get not just burnt but speed-cooked on the outside and deep down below, so that the burn has a deep ravine structure, inflammation from the lowest point pushing up increasingly dead flesh, itself inflamed. 

Also you can hear them very clearly, the fats in your skin and meat hissing as they burn away.

It is also bad when the top layer eventually sloughs off, leaving naked glistening unskin that cracks and twists as it dries and festers. 

Eventually, though, they'll both just be shadows on my skin. Reminders.

*

We are who we are because of what has happened to us and how we have dealt with it or not dealt with it. At each moment we are the single result of the accumulation of our time as a phenomenon, and the next  moment leaves that phenomenon behind, where it no longer exists and also stays with the phenomenon that is in the moment, this phenomenon which trails an ever-expanding tail of past forms of itself. 

The self is an equation constantly subject to new variables, whose result is accordingly in constant flux. An expanding sphere. 

So, you grow. Older. When the variables stop changing, that is death. 

*

When you're dead, the past is all there is (for the phenomenon which was itself in relation to the moment, not for its trail of selves, which tend to stick around to varying degrees and cause trouble). 

Not so when we are alive; however, I have this tendency to act as though this is so. I live as though the past loomed over the present with such power as to close it down entirely, to freeze me and bury me. I act as though the past has spoken in a voice of judgment and that the tale is told, the math is over, and there is nothing to add, and if there is more content, it is just a shitty appendix to a squandered story.

This way of interpreting the past and of letting it work upon me is a death-aspect, a demon.

How does one defeat this demon?

*

Well, I'll start like this: the past may be the future only two instants too young, but it is also the fucking past and however much power it may have over that future, the future it is not. Only the future is the future. The past cannot see or know anything about the future, only the moment which is becoming the future, the self in the moment of the equation having a result in one moment, only that has an apprehension of the future, as it is happening, and as it recedes into the past.

If you look back, you die. It isn't just that you lose Eurydice. You die. You missed the whole point and now you're dead.

They'd be justified in burying you with your head on backwards.

*

With demons, you don't riddle. You don't wrestle. You don't take up arms or charge or trick or gamble.

You turn away and you take the steps of faith. Forward. Into what, you know not. But away from this demon shaking fistfuls of your own ghosts at you, shoving its tongue into your ear night and day, singing skeletal, endlessly repeated dirges over the live music that's playing right now. 

*

I don't forget a lot of stuff in life. I forget to turn in pieces of homework, among other stuff that is expected of me and stuff I said I would do, but I don't forget life, the living part, the stuff that happened, what I saw, heard, tasted, felt. I forget names, I forget the exact placements in a linear geography of time, but I don't forget the prevailing light and the way the wind was blowing; I don't forget the words or the signs, even if I can't quote them verbatim. Nothing is perfect and every translation transforms. But my memory is insistent and insistently clear. The past is very real to me. Life has been fucked up and very beautiful, so bad and so wonderful I could tear myself apart trying to feel it all at once.

Memory has its uses. It's what makes us human. It's what makes the math work out to something that expands and climbs, rather than merely iterate. Remembering how I have acted, what I have said, what I have done, and attempting to exceed myself as I was in hopes of remembering myself one day as I had hoped to be--it is the past that we use to imagine ourselves into existence, the impetus we have to will our lives into a shape, the stone from which we push off in our endeavor. 

What does not work is trying to jump and hang on tight at the same time. In this bodily/psychic contest, hanging on always wins.

To be ever engaged in the act of pushing off the rock and onto the next movement, the next rock to push off of. That is how you fight the demon that has you clinging endlessly to the same stone.


--JL