mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Fourth

It is a summer night, with all that meant in the best times of our earlier and still-unfinished youth. There are people at our house, and some will sleep here: they have changed into the clothes they will wear while they dream. The spirits and beer and cigarettes might be candy: though they seemed once to be accoutrements of adulthood, they now have the mildest effects, as though they are gummy taffies or Pixie-Stix.

After the fireworks we came home. We have aged now back into childhood: we want the simplest things and laugh easily. Our domestic affairs are as settled as they were when they belonged to tall and deep-voiced adults talking in low tones in another room. We want nothing but to laugh, so we play games and feel the breeze in the air: it is like a gift from an Earth momentarily without catastrophe, at least so far as we know. Like children now, we read no news.

In the searing intensity of our early twenties sleep never came, or when it did it did so after some bender or in the early morning. Now we feel again like boys and girls who want to see the late television shows but cannot keep our eyes open: we fight yawning slumber as it moves over our minds, making everything seem dreamy and open and resonant; every sound has an echo, ever light a haloed glow.

It is so hard to stay awake in this beautiful summer night, but we fight to; and the fight feels good because we know that sleep will be a gift like the breeze: cool, soft, carefree.

Tags: fiction prose piece childhood fourth of july
From this frenzy nothing is being kept; from these cascading thoughts nothing will be recorded, nothing archived, nothing photographed, nothing broadcast. It is not a question of choice but of forms of forgetting: One might forget by permitting blankness to spread like a chemical through canvas, bleaching the fibers of their paint and leaving a vacant whiteness that is only a vacuum of what you experienced but is itself a sort of fullness, a density of nullity. Or one might forget by detailing it all in small strokes, page after page, in tiny glyphs, margins overflowing with notes and annotations, diagrams and drawings: this forgetting will happen as a corrosion from within, the years eating away at the fat under the skin, as slowly what was stuffed becomes thin: a skeleton left where once one had flesh. Over time, what was left out subsumes what was put in. Or one might forget with falsity: the memory shifting like a bored teen, long-limbed and contriving each posture, projecting from his spine affectations one knows well but from which one will never be free. Now you recall being in love; but now it seems you hated him from the start; or now you think, she was right for me; but now you think: no one was ever right for me. Your memory is your marketer: what lie must it use to sell you the newest products of the personality? Or one might forget by turning again to the present, where all that one remembers continues to happen again and again, as though memory is like imagination: a modest metaphorical apparatus for variations on the themes we already know. Whatever we do, we will not record these moments no matter how fiercely we seek to inscribe them, frantically etching them in our flesh like officer of Kafka’s penal colony, coordinating Designer and Harrow to cut deep into the body the judgments and lessons we yearn to experience serenely and purely before our bodies are cast off and present, past, and future cease utterly.

From this frenzy nothing is being kept; from these cascading thoughts nothing will be recorded, nothing archived, nothing photographed, nothing broadcast. It is not a question of choice but of forms of forgetting:

One might forget by permitting blankness to spread like a chemical through canvas, bleaching the fibers of their paint and leaving a vacant whiteness that is only a vacuum of what you experienced but is itself a sort of fullness, a density of nullity.

Or one might forget by detailing it all in small strokes, page after page, in tiny glyphs, margins overflowing with notes and annotations, diagrams and drawings: this forgetting will happen as a corrosion from within, the years eating away at the fat under the skin, as slowly what was stuffed becomes thin: a skeleton left where once one had flesh. Over time, what was left out subsumes what was put in.

Or one might forget with falsity: the memory shifting like a bored teen, long-limbed and contriving each posture, projecting from his spine affectations one knows well but from which one will never be free. Now you recall being in love; but now it seems you hated him from the start; or now you think, she was right for me; but now you think: no one was ever right for me. Your memory is your marketer: what lie must it use to sell you the newest products of the personality?

Or one might forget by turning again to the present, where all that one remembers continues to happen again and again, as though memory is like imagination: a modest metaphorical apparatus for variations on the themes we already know.

Whatever we do, we will not record these moments no matter how fiercely we seek to inscribe them, frantically etching them in our flesh like officer of Kafka’s penal colony, coordinating Designer and Harrow to cut deep into the body the judgments and lessons we yearn to experience serenely and purely before our bodies are cast off and present, past, and future cease utterly.

Tags: forgetting memory piece franz kafka