blackrimglasses

Its a funny thing, time. You find yourself watching as it passes slowly, then fast, slowly then fast. Today was spent mostly in meetings, and the time was fast until repose in the evening, then slow again. I look at clocks and one by one things move toward a past, and are lost in memory.

Memory too, how do we remember? How do we forget? How do we reconcile that the things that seem so present now will be turned into something so distant that often we wonder if they happened at all. Recollection serves as a reminder not of time passing, but of the very fact that time itself is a mutable construct, subject to slippages and removal from conciousness.

Do you remember being three? I do. But only 15 minutes of time from that year. A year became 15 minutes, but without that year where would I be?

It goes like this as well: I think about when I was 9, going to summer camp and we stayed at my grandpa Jim’s house (Ian and I) before we took the bus to Malibu. I think of Jim and Lisa staying at our house after the earthquake, of fixing computers, visiting in Sherman Oaks. All told it adds up to a collective temporal memory of a few hours. A few hours for 93 years of life. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair.

I long for the day when we can upload our thoughts into outboard memory, go through them at will and experience things as they should, with duration, with temporal validity.

Instead we’re left with fragments, and we must reconcile those into a picture of the past.

What this amounts to is that I looked through my TextAmerica feed. 760 pictures from three years of me. Three years, reduced to 760 pictures, and I found myself missing things, thinking about things, wondering about things.

And then I think about the pictures, the photographs and videos and memories captured outside of ourselves.

When I’m 93, what will remain? Two collective hours of memory within a great-grandchild? Something more?

How will we be remembered when the light fades and we go to the never?

How will we be in the world when we’ve passed through it?