Red Thread(s)

Regarding sequencing: if I do not look here for awhile, wch tends to be the case -- but if I use this as a notebook, transcribing things here as I might write in project-oriented notebooks -- the red notebook, the blue and orange books; the green one for dialogues... I discover a process of drafting [draughting] at work; moods and breezes dictate a general climate or tone. One item suprisingly connects to its lost predecessor. Another gesture might echo across lines months from now. Somethings lost in the flurries and mists.
To proceed with doubt as a general rule,

"But according to Montaigne, one is various. I can't lay down a rule for my feelings."
__ Virginia Woolf, Diary, 12,I.1924

on memory; from memory?
I cannot say for sure.

I thought/wrote earlier this morning, that "if I think for a moment that I write in order to remember, then I am mistaken, because I rarely look back. I must write then, in order to forget."

Been thinking a little about information technologies, and how all this apparent wealth of information has nothing to do with memory (although sites of "passive narcissism" such as Facebook and Myspace ensure that more drunken foolishness and more kittycats have been documented over the past month than in the whole of human history). Not sure where I picked up the "passive narcissism" phrase; on memory I borrow a little from Kristeva: memory requires interrogation.
"What Plato and St. Augustine referred to as memory was a permament doubting."
-- Julia Kristeva

If I write here to remember things, or to concretize them in verbal form, then I'm mistaken and my intentions are flawed -- for I never go back; I write but I do not read, so that the process of remembering becomes the process of forgetting.
I write not to remember, but to forget.

"...if I'm not writing The Brothers Karamazov while I read it, I'm not doing anything."
-- Jean Genet. Found here.

I dreamt last night, & vestiges of it have stirred up during the day, the way a slow breeze moves the surface of a pond so that a slip of water laps up against the far edge catching and reflecting the light for a moment -- or maybe it's the sound of it that draws your eye; the effect of some event displaced from its center, some unseen area, to the periphery -- and only a sliver there. Drawn to it, that space at the edge, its ripples having already fanned out, the sound already faded, so it's merely the sense of displacement that remains, an absence.
You worry at it like one does at the edges of scab, but you can't re-create, reincarnate the wound; one cannot will the revelatory effect of an involuntary memory.

I went to the library looking for a particular quote from Genet to post here, but that volume was missing. This, I wrote instead.

To be immersed in reading; to be outside of time. I love the slow feeling, the shift that takes place when I come out of its undertow and feel the tautness in my neck and shoulders; a mild, somewhat sweet morose delectation in my upper body's stiffness, the physical awareness that time has passed. Closing the book, I notice how far the bookmark has moved -- or, in later opening it, I become conscious of the thinning distance between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand -- lightening in the incremental shift of pages from hand to hand. I try not to look at the last page number, avoid doing the borderline-obsessive counting thing -- how far to the end? (Esp. difficult towards the end of Proust, the process of wch was its own little drama). I feel this bother, this business of getting to the end is distracting, and -- though I do it -- quantifying my pace in any way feels somehow beneath me. I want to be in the present, absorbed by the work & free to flit back and forth, double-checking things that resonante, or simply being there. Maybe it's why I tend to be more interested in the way things are told -- be it book or movie -- than what the story is. The turn, the break, the oddly placed scene, stray thought. Maybe it will make sense later; but for the moment, simply to be drawn into that fold.

The dream, then, of a book without page numbers -- or to read as if there were none.

"The priest wanted to admonish him to stop this absurd searching. Well, said vapeur, maybe you'd like me to work in the filature, like all the other blockheads, and maybe you'll say that as I know something about machines I might even become a foreman. But I don't want to become a foreman, I like sitting in my shed looking for something that can't be found."
-- Louis Paul Boon, Chapel Road