Unlocked

Be grateful, says the day, you’ve stayed six days; you are a normal person again. That’s true: after the stresses of the last few weeks, open, bright days and reading; no longer rising with first light and working before I have to be in the office. Am I reading? Remembering reading more than reading. Letting my memory reread books that are locked inside me.

Locked: like the ice that locks itself in the earth all winter. Then comes the spring and the thaw, and the earth starts to breathe. What was it called, in geography, when the whole surface of the unfrozen earth starts to move? Solifluction? Then there are those who are locked in, who are unable to move anything but their eyes. What is the name for the awakening from that state, if it comes?

Unlocked: I imagine the sprawling of a house so large that it lets the inside becomes outside. In one room, it rains, in another, there is a desert over which birds vanish (Mirror), or a forest in which wolves  run (A Company of Wolves). Memories of reading, of viewing: the thread of Ariadne leads me into the labyrinth, not out of it. But this is not nostalgia – or, if it is, it is that nostalghia (with an ‘h’) about which Tarkovsky made a film.

Memory, non-memory, it is the exposure of the past to what did not occur: not to what would have been possible, then; not to the path untaken or the door handles untried, but to a kind of retaking of what occurred, where the whole of time moves. Solifluction, the unlocked earth: everything is in movement: to remember, now, is to receive everything anew, my past come again.