Scabbed over wounds that still bleed within[1]
What to do with such a wound? How to stop the bleeding, if you cannot press on the site? I imagine the heart will take it in, choosing not to distinguish the lonesome blood from that which it pumps relentlessly. I have never liked examining heart diagrams, for it seems too delicate and perplexing a thing to be responsible for our survival. In any case, all that is fragile is actually strength. Tell me a more beautiful and kind pursuit than that of a body dedicated to persisting, even amidst its own inflictions. Forgiveness is built into bodies, the very presence of a scab is proof. A reminder to remember in the shape of a scar: compassion is not a given, it requires a certain degree of recognition. You only need to watch the soft rise and fall of an animal’s chest or the slight quiver of a person’s eyelash during sleep to understand: we are all connected in fragility. This is often a belated discovery, sometimes only realised through suffering. It is perhaps one of those discoveries that cannot be taught by others. To know it is to feel nature in every vein. The task is not to forget once the suffering grows distant, or whatever else it was that awakened your consciousness fades.
As for memory, our bodies are wired to remember, even when they would be better off forgetting, as in the case of a lost limb. Some memories lie dormant until you enter a space or hear a familiar sound that reignites them. In The Passion According to G.H, Clarice Lispector described remembrance as an ‘immemorial effort.’ What does it mean for memory to be immemorial? It would suggest a viability beyond one’s being, but how can a memory outlive its owner? Perhaps immemorial is not memory itself, but the human tendency to look back, repeated across history. A tendency illuminated by D. A. Calf in Spectres, I, where the past overlaps with the present.
You get the impression that you are perhaps somewhere you have been before
If considered a repository for memory, sound has the capacity to disrupt the temporal and spatial. The relationship between sound and memory is most known through music, but what of the sounds that cannot be played, and as such, are not so easily returned to? I am thinking of sounds specific to a site once visited or a time endured. Recalling them is precarious, as the present inevitably intermingles with the past, thus it is here that memory is labelled ‘unreliable.’ Some memories we never see clearly, as if the effort to recall their every detail reduces their attainability. But what the eye cannot see the body remembers, D. A. Calf enunciates.
It is very quiet… You only hear the rustle of the wind through the foliage and the passage of air
There is a desire in deciphering why certain places hold memories, not merely because people are contemplative by nature. It is disquieting to realise the limits of one’s own memory, and to be reminded that our bodies cannot be controlled entirely. Yet, I am comforted in knowing that memory exists beyond the vessel of the self. If shared with a place, particularly a place which is destined to outlive us all, forgetting is not so terrifying. Nature perseveres like a body: growing against frailty. But unlike a human body which lives only momentarily, the sun is forever. The rays we bathe in are the same ones our mothers have done, the roots of the trees are the tendons in our bodies. There, underground, they form a lifeline, like the hands of loves remembered, softly intertwined.
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[1] Italicised lines in this piece are from D. A. Calf’s Spectres, I and A Spectral Geology
Tara Grace is a nonfiction writer and poet from Melbourne. She writes art and cultural criticism with publications in various literary journals. Holding degrees in creative writing and sociology from the University of Melbourne, she currently resides in Vienna.
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