Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust:

"Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets."
- Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, David Foster Wallace

This caught my eye, not least because of my recent interest in geometry, and creating a concatenation between literature and the mathematical sign. It parallels neatly, with a certain eloquence even, and allows me to express what it is about Proust that sets a profound reverse upon modern thought; in watching the fading spire there is not a geometry that is being alluded towards, but a deep sense of the space inside and within time, that the spire signified departure from a known past, an ending that was immensely physical but not actual. The memory, the efficacy of that known spire became the locus of certain longings, desires and daydreams, wishes to reverse time and to occupy it, capture and contain all the possibilities within it. Not only a geometric relation, but a metaphysical realization, that in that particular moment that spire could have perforated or made swell a longing and a sense of being outside of time. 

Always would Proust recall the moments that past not with regret but a deep sense of value and purpose; the memory as a living space, an extension into time which is not lost but slowly is filled with minute descriptions, the violent signs of detachment and loss which are signs of love, or reclaiming oblivion and the certainty that life is not appearance and neither in society is it apparent. Sonatas weave amidst the voices of figures who are merely semblances, not by any means known, nor can they be, yet Proust in translating a straight line, a line of flight into a flight diffused with time, with every moment reclaiming itself with understandings, clarifications, elucidations, so that there is no totality and a memory that is honest and lives inside of loss, of unrealized desire, understands that it is in leaving this totality, this body that is so material to others yet immaterial, timeless, expansive in our own memories, our own selves. 

Those flights that take place physically are redundant to the figure who gazes past definitions, allows the very world to become overwhelmed with possible fleet states of being, phrases that are incomplete, words spoken in order not to become, but to be, to remain this being of time, connected to all types of viscera, not only the material but the artistic, finally beginning to see that one can only understand oneself on one's own terms, that a straight line is never straight but departs into time, bends with imagination, becomes endless.