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signals lost but not forgotten
Feb. 28th, 2012 06:28 pmTo remember love is to love. I would go further, and say, in some ways: to love is to remember. To remember is to love. Love is not a verb. Love is a signal.
How do you love when you can't remember consciously? You remember unconsciously. Your fingertips remember, the small of your back remembers, your breath remembers, quickening. Memory permeates love as a lingering scent permeates a flower, clinging to it long after it's plucked.
I appreciate those who say love is an action, a verb, but then too, memory is a verb. Breath is a verb. We may love as we breathe: memory without awareness, in silence, as a reflex.
If memory is the lingering of oneself, so too is love. It gives me hope to say that those who can remember but cannot love, are still loving. Those who love others while losing memory of the past-- those, I fear, are no longer loving. Being alone long enough, it seems memory acquires a special importance. An act of stubborn imagination, recreating the remaining dregs of magic left to oneself. It begins to seem an all right sort of eternity, a fair trade: being an ageless undead creature who cannot love or die, but can still remember, and conversely, it begins to seem that the casual encouragement of forgetfulness by the well-meaning is nothing but an act of desecration. It begins to seem that pain is as solid a marker of love as joy, and perhaps more so. That memory may feel carved on your skin, to the point of absurdity: beat (ow), beat (oww), beat (ahhh). Even those who longer love may bleed.
As long as the emotionless, the walking dead may remember love, they are bathed in an echo of its light. That too is love; like Morse code, like the light of a long-dead star, the memory transmits its signal, and so long as someone remains to see that light, to decipher that code as they sit staring intently, pitilessly, at a set of abstract signs: it is real enough. More than real enough. That is what I want to believe: 00011000101011000....
How do you love when you can't remember consciously? You remember unconsciously. Your fingertips remember, the small of your back remembers, your breath remembers, quickening. Memory permeates love as a lingering scent permeates a flower, clinging to it long after it's plucked.
I appreciate those who say love is an action, a verb, but then too, memory is a verb. Breath is a verb. We may love as we breathe: memory without awareness, in silence, as a reflex.
If memory is the lingering of oneself, so too is love. It gives me hope to say that those who can remember but cannot love, are still loving. Those who love others while losing memory of the past-- those, I fear, are no longer loving. Being alone long enough, it seems memory acquires a special importance. An act of stubborn imagination, recreating the remaining dregs of magic left to oneself. It begins to seem an all right sort of eternity, a fair trade: being an ageless undead creature who cannot love or die, but can still remember, and conversely, it begins to seem that the casual encouragement of forgetfulness by the well-meaning is nothing but an act of desecration. It begins to seem that pain is as solid a marker of love as joy, and perhaps more so. That memory may feel carved on your skin, to the point of absurdity: beat (ow), beat (oww), beat (ahhh). Even those who longer love may bleed.
As long as the emotionless, the walking dead may remember love, they are bathed in an echo of its light. That too is love; like Morse code, like the light of a long-dead star, the memory transmits its signal, and so long as someone remains to see that light, to decipher that code as they sit staring intently, pitilessly, at a set of abstract signs: it is real enough. More than real enough. That is what I want to believe: 00011000101011000....
