I’ve seen filters work a dozen times; pour sludge-like substance into elongated, conical funnel, and the dross is left behind, leaving a homogeneous looking liquid in container of choice. Does memory work that way? The elusive and forgetable are condensed from the significant through our synapses and reified in our strorage bank of ideas and thoughts. It’s as if the abstractions we are so used to reading on pages evokes concrete scenes from your past, or scenes that you put together like a mish-mashed collage of meaning.
You become a by-stander to your own memory, as if participating is the essential yearning or the essential horror of a past lit or blighted by actions that you simultaneously reject and affirm as your own; reject because bad memories are like the sting at the tip of a tail poised to strike, or affirm because good memories allow us the necessary fiction of having once been happy.
And as soon as you veil your mind’s eye with analytical lenses, you might see that not all good memories lived in that same joyful milieu in which they were born. There’s always that remaining smudge of the stains that would have adorned any present moment; but it’s easier to live in bad faith, don’t you think, believing that these were happier times, and happier moments.
Perhaps there is a mysterious system of classification that delineates between a good memory and a bad memory, sytematically cataloguing or good times or bad times, everytime our daily lives are forced through the strainer of our own synapses.
