“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Spring has arrived. Usually a time of great joy, as we emerge out of a cold bleak winter. Look out across the shoreline across at a distant forest to a new beginning, a new chapter. But that didn't happen this year. I am reminded of the colour yellow, the sunflowers that Van Gogh painted for his friend Paul Gaugins visit. Yellow - A colour of hope. But the visit went terribly wrong. Such an event would have a profound effect on Van Goghs life and work. Today we marvel and rejoice at Van Gogh's great legacy. Van Gogh at the time at that precise moment never felt that way. A story of two opposite halves. A world of total Joy. A world of total Sadness.
Every so often in life we pick up our shattered pieces, resolve to rebuild ourselves, lay the very core foundation stones of our souls once more; only for an event to re-shatter that matter, those emotions, those atoms and synapses that control the vast complex machinery of man again. Memories are torturing us. Interlaced with words and images that reach into our very depths and make us who we once were. Answers, truths and consequences forcibly absent. Perhaps in the future there will come a time when we can rewire, erase all memories and words. Gone.
A Utopian place where language is liquid, free and flowing. The silence so eloquent and the stillness forever sacrosanct and protected.
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Spring has arrived. Usually a time of great joy, as we emerge out of a cold bleak winter. Look out across the shoreline across at a distant forest to a new beginning, a new chapter. But that didn't happen this year. I am reminded of the colour yellow, the sunflowers that Van Gogh painted for his friend Paul Gaugins visit. Yellow - A colour of hope. But the visit went terribly wrong. Such an event would have a profound effect on Van Goghs life and work. Today we marvel and rejoice at Van Gogh's great legacy. Van Gogh at the time at that precise moment never felt that way. A story of two opposite halves. A world of total Joy. A world of total Sadness.
Every so often in life we pick up our shattered pieces, resolve to rebuild ourselves, lay the very core foundation stones of our souls once more; only for an event to re-shatter that matter, those emotions, those atoms and synapses that control the vast complex machinery of man again. Memories are torturing us. Interlaced with words and images that reach into our very depths and make us who we once were. Answers, truths and consequences forcibly absent. Perhaps in the future there will come a time when we can rewire, erase all memories and words. Gone.
A Utopian place where language is liquid, free and flowing. The silence so eloquent and the stillness forever sacrosanct and protected.
Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone
The Tempest William Shakespearesunflowers |
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