From “First I Killed My Father”

This is not my first memory. Memory. It is something so heavy. It holds all of regret, shame, trauma, sadness, and even heavier joy and love and hope. Pregnant and overabundant with feeling. It seems unthinkable that all of knowledge and lifetimes can be shoehorned into an organ of three grams. Memory is fallible, exaggerated, and immaterial. But it dictates everything we are and everything we produce. It is the essence of our identity and the impossibility of originality. This is not a reductivist statement, that we are our memory. In fact it is charitable because we are less than our memory. Memory is more than we ever could be. The manifestation of civilizations, of the collective unconscious, the coming into of the future is the preparation of more memories, the past its archival. To think memory is just a component of the past is misguided. Memory is synonymous with time, enlacing, traversing, extending, overlapping with everyone and all renditions of one’s own inconstancy. No wonder the first drugs were created to help us forget. No human can manage such a weight, and one that only increases with the years. This I suppose is the primary reason why adults are more unhappy, more strained, more stressed than their childhood selves or any child in general. It is not that the mentation of children is less developed or that they are immature or naïve but simply that they have not been loaded with as many memories. A box with 10 kg of sand will weigh more than one with 5kg. We needed Lethe in our legends, nepenthe in our lives. In Hindu mythology, there is a reason people cannot recall the past life; a person can hardly bear the weight of the memories of one. Then add the weight of your family history, your nation’s, human civilization. If even the events of a day are too heavy, how can we possibly cope with the immensity of eternity? No wonder we drink. Alcohol is only the modern drug of amnesia. And to continue to demonize with no alternative will force into existence only a greater drug of oblivion. God, it's so heavy. Its abstraction, like love, its un-pinnability in science and divinity, correlation with consciousness, its microcosmic reflection of greater unknown like atoms and the universe make it an endless source of wonder and poetry and lamentation. I mean to say it is all too easy to wax on memory as a foolishly aspiring poet, who is too stupid to realize their own mediocrity writes lines as if they came from Shakespeare or Plath or Elliot or Bukowski. For most modern writers to even say they were inspired by writers of the past is a disservice to them, like shitting on their graves. I hope it is clear I am not writing about memory here because it is easy but because it is necessary and because it forms the crux of my life philosophy. But the human condition is not to forget, but to bear. Most mistake the former for the latter. Everything we do is to forget, whether it is to work, to talk, to drink. Solitude therefore is the practice of bearing memory. But being only must be mediated by some action to dilute the weight of memory. Most being addicts. Men ejaculate to let off the memory of unrequited love and loneliness. Women give birth to offload the memory of unwanted sex. God made the universe to offload the burden of his own narrative. I pity those who do not have a weight-management, not weight-loss, technique, sinking under their own mental obesity, because they are crushed slowly, too unlearned to even wonder why their futile conversations, nights of tears, and sessions of therapy leave them existentially unchanged. Some take pictures not because they are afraid they will forget but because they cannot bear the weight of the event transpiring in front of them. This has changed with the current age of social media self-indulgence but to abscond from the present with a selfie is at best inability and at worst unwillingness to consolidate the weight of one’s own transpiring existence. Evidently, we are becoming weaker, more inadvertently cowardly at lifting our own weight, hoisting onto our shoulders the events of the present much less past, much less beyond our own story. But I propose writing is the best way to bear the weight of memory. And just as we lift to activate the muscular systems of antifragility, destroying our sarcomeres and sinews to grow stronger, so too we must adequately exercise our memories to grow psychologically stronger. How can writing uniquely accomplish this task? It cannot. Only words and only the words of a writer can. And only when those words are used not to offload and flee like a teenage girl’s diary but unravel the mind and all of its dolorous mystery. This is not just the thesis of this book and all my writing, but its purpose. I write with these words what God never could with His. Otherwise, I would implode under the weight of my own ruminations. Here then is my first real memory.