Hopelessness without hope – what does that mean? Hopelessness and no hope, without even the glimmer of hope – what does that mean? It is inconceivable – that you can think of hopelessness, conceive of it, already attests to the power of thought; to think is already to hope.
But what of an experience without power, where power drains away and you are immersed in the great marsh of the moment? You have lost your hold on time; you are beneath time; time gives you no purchase. But you cannot think of this, cannot conceive of it. To think is to find purchase, to move upstream of the great marsh; it is to discover the fresh movement of the river.
What is it to live beneath time? You cannot remember – to remember is to have grasped the moment and inserted it among others. Memory depends on the commensurability of such moments; it cannot grasp hopelessness, which is ungraspable.
Hopelessness: no purchase, no fleeing upstream or downstream. A wound in time; the wounding of time, imaginable as a wound in space – as the marsh on which nothing can be built and nothing began. What is it, hopelessness? The absence of time, time unworked. What is it, to lose hope?
True, I can remember nothing of hopelessness. But does it not insist, hopelessness, in my memory? Does it not insist, pressing towards me, as a non-memory within memory? As though forgetting were something tangible and present, such that it exceeded everything present and the measure of presence. As though forgetting brought to memory something more present than anything. As though it brought from the past the collapsed sun that consumes everything.
Now the past is the event horizon; now, across the past and the return of the past, disappears everything present, everything alive. Hope disappears; the past envelops you. Who are you, no longer alive, but not dead? The past has come. The measureless past has come close to us. It has returned, the past, but the past unremembered. It has touched memory, the forgotten past. And isn’t this the way hopelessness comes? Isn’t this the way it returns, hopelessness? It is the past come again; the stretch of marshes in which nothing is possible.
I am wounded; time has left great marks across me. Wounded, and the past has left claw marks in my flesh. I can’t remember; I’ve lost hold on memory. But the past remembers; it remembers in my place. Who am I, thus forgotten? I am buried deep in the earth. Who am I? The dreaming one, whose dreams are the aurora borealis. I’ve forgotten; forgetting happens in me and across me. The wind scrapes the marshes; the wind flattens the marsh-reeds. Above me, somewhere above, aurora borealis.
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