Thu, 19 May 2005

1/2
The last time I saw my grandfather he was setting fire to his journals. He had been keeping a journal in overstuffed Mead spiral notebooks since he was a child, which also substituted for a photo album, a calendar, a clipbook. Burning the lot would be at least a weekend project at the rate he was going, examining each page before tearing it from the spiral metal and dropping it into the flames. I came out and stared at him, and he shot me a look like I was trying to teach grass how to walk. “I’m not burning ‘em all, you dolt. I’m just thinning it out some. You have to make a little mystery.” I told him I didn’t understand, didn’t see why posterity shouldn’t be rewarded with as complete a record as possible. He told me the events in a life are trivial, inflated with the breath of context and sympathy only as it suits our vanity, our mirror-vain flattery. It is the gap, and the silence, and the breath between words where the greatness lies, for that is where we can stretch as far as we allow ourselves, set adrift to wonder, wander, build atop what was once just the smallest of irrelevant details. “This is what you leave them, when you leave. Questions which have no answer, or no answer that will satisfy, so they will turn the memory over in their hands like a cold river stone, the lightest of suggestive sketches as to a truth greater than the truth of our small lives lived like rodents, money-hungry, fuck-hungry, noise-hungry. Give them stillness, silence and darkness and they will remember you forever, which is critical, as you only stay in the second world as long as you are remembered in the first, and if all you leave them is the meager facts, your life in the second world will be a shrill re-enactment of the days they may remember. Open the space to mystery, and the second world is to be aflot on a lattice of your loved one’s dreams.” I continued staring at him, and told him he should come in out of the cold. “Someday,” he said to me, but not to me, to some other me that I would become, “someday you’ll see I’m right.”
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #