Memory and Positive Thinking

Here's a link to this week's Radio 4 programme 'Start the Week'. Andrew Marr with Orhan Pamuk, Barbara Ehrenreich, Simon Schama and Susan Richards. Orhan Pamuk and Simon Schama drew me in. Barbara Ehrenreich has something fascinating to say about the fascism of positive thiking. Susan Richards annoyed the hell out of me.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pqfjh/Start_the_Week_11_01_2010/

I got to thinking and writing and this is the result. Maybe later I'll revist and rework.

Rub together two fingers and the roughness you feel, let it multiply a few times in your mind. Concentrate upon the sensation alone and whatever it is that you wish to do put it aside for awhile and imagine loss. After you part your fingers both the impression of touch and that of loss remain, like diminishing and wistful itches, slipping away into the future. If you now stroke your hands together gently soft courageously there is a memory of that original marking. Put your hand to your face and feel its warmth, part your lips and breathe out gently, dampness on the palm and fingers; if your lips are not moving it can seem as if there is no separation between the sensation felt in the lips or the hands. Smell your breath as a lover would smell it. Know where you are soft and where you are coarse. Our face is a record of our time, contoured routed a death mask in life.

Physical specificity is very truthful; it integrates space and time in our senses and we cannot deny it. Physicality can catalyse memory. Remembering is an act filtered through time, pinning down details; one memory can spin off into many new worlds. I have borrowed these words as I have borrowed the knotted place and moment that I occupy. One day I will have to give it back.

It is said that I want to pin my life down to its impulses, to create the opposite of an idea and discover an electric centre where obsessive love resides, and where I am peripheral. It is said that if one cannot see a golden future then it is you that is at fault, as life cannot be to blame. Well let me tell you that life is bloody well to blame. To control every aspect of life is non-sensical, there is too much to take in. Only in the desert, if living the life of an ascetic, could the material life be separated sufficiently from the spiritual to allow sense to be made of it all. And even then the material could harm. No positive thought could make it better. No positive thought can make it better.