memory and language on dreaming
language has a sensibly tense, cosmic relationship with memory. language is the mother of reception, of understanding, or trying to, of gifting and receiving, redefining—thank you, i love you—and memory as the father of just a little more; the root and wreckage of all final humanity, the cost of remembrance, and yet it offers us a garish, secretive loving that only one individual can believe in: you, and your moving, seeing, sensing, being. we believe it anyway. memory is the eye we spend our lives looking for in love, such a blade we worship to know the beauty of lacking in language so we know it’s abundance. so we know that the closeness, shortness, and intimacy of breath can make up an entire dialect, just like any instrument our bodies are full of song. we are humorous all of the time in love and so we laugh, we bleed a vocal sensational joy and curse the world loudly because we are ashamed, and sad to no end about the end of life in advance. to make up for this, we relish in our deep, undeniable passions that have no core to them, but are the surfaces to all other wants and needs; these are the areas of knowledge that language and memory replicate in their doubling, that make us hot with cleverness.
the more time we spend away from our internal bodies—soul, system, suffering—we learn to be outlived by our physicality, so we regard and render the spiritual less; the permanent natural way of things becomes our mother tongue. all else forgotten about until we are lucky enough to see that surrendering to love is the only way we can both learn (yearn) and teach (touch) simultaneously. the love of each unique, coreless devotion—song, fever, ridicule, dance, harmony, rage, sisterhood, sex, prayer, assault, loathing, remorse—balancing the intake with the output, the gift of noise with the memory of it’s erasure.
the student who is young still sees truth in her wisdom; this kind of damaged flexibility makes her careless but majestic, and she grows into the mentor’s metaphor for himself. he who is forever a student of all the universe’s teachings even when he does not believe in philosophies or religions or children, even more so after slipping away into time’s vast stretches. it is just like they say, for language knows everything, it’s benign invention tells us the more we know, the less we know. to know this, all you must do is learn a language. it is curiosity that kills the cat but not out of discovery, out of continuity which condemns; it is this mutualistic pride telling us if we live for long enough, hard enough, good enough, we might step foot into the audience of our whims where we wait for recall. recall which is answers. answers that we spend evenings wasting over. recall which is a time or place or kind of magic we used to have when we were small; that we hold onto but cannot be sure of our relationship to.
it is all lost to time for this is the waiting room for death, when we look up and see we have entered another room called reflection without noticing we’ve travelled in the first place. mentor and student, much like language and memory, are boundless in such an echo chamber as death’s waiting room because they are obstacles and comrades in discovery, and in understanding that even when the mystery of life and death and love is solved; the words and time it took is unending. it is only in the place where memory cannot function as the mouth, when words suffer to accept the truth of a life—it’s weight, it’s fragility, it’s dread, it’s hope in the same eternity and rational ends that act in the boundaries of history and present—that we learn about dreaming.
