Nonchalance

Carelessness: is there a way we might have been said to catch time out, to have found time when it was gathering itself without going forward? When time has stopped going forward except in a kind of duplication of the world, as though everything was caught in its eddying? Suspended time: time without momentum; time that does not find its way to succession. Stranded moments, without continuity. Moments that remain, as though outside themselves. Thickening themselves, doubling themselves, undergoing a strange crystallisation.

I remember; I always remember. Coming again and again: those times, those moments. But I do not bring them; time gives them to me. Gives them, but only as they have fallen outside linear continuity. Moments that should have gone to sleep. Have disappeared into forgetting. And yet moments, too, that seem to be linked to a kind of forgetting – that seem to have forgotten me.

Nonchalance: this is the word that comes to me when I think of those moments that will not pass. The carelessness of time, time’s drifting. It’s true I kept a diary, that I thought those days had to be remembered. But I was only doubling what remembered itself in me. Came to itself, but as though without regard for me. As though I hadn’t lived them yet; as though I’d only begun to live what turned me aside.

Was I there, with you? But I was barely with myself. Memory does not enclose time, but is opened by it. Memory opens like an oyster’s shell. The pearl: the moment thickened, the opacity of time. I do not keep what I remember; it keeps me. Nonchalance: but without regard for me; turning aside. Kept by what turns aside, by a moment that ignores me, but for all that, enlists me as a witness.

I saw, I heard; I touched you. No: it was you that touched me; the affect came from without; it arrived as from a great distance. And you saw yourself in me, by way of me. Sometimes I flatter yourself that you found peace in me; that you lay down inside me and closed your eyes, that I provided a shelter for what does not rest, but turns in itself. But you never stopped turning, and turning away from me. You never stopped forgetting me.

And I think that’s what you do again, here, as I write. Sometimes, memories lose their force when I record them. I am relieved; they lose their hold on me. Writing remembers them for me. But other memories return by way of writing, surprising me. As I record those moments, I also realise I’ve recorded nothing at all. Eluding me, indifferent to me, they summon writing, they ask to be written, only to slip away once again.

The stars in Van Gogh’s paintings turn in great wells in the sky, and that’s how I imagine these moments turn in the great sky of memory. Stars burn as they consume themselves; they ask for nothing else, no substance. And so too these memories are nothing but themselves, burning in solitary passion. And just as stars can collapse on themselves, devouring their own light and drawing the space around them across their threshold, I imagine memories that will attenuate all the others, fraying them, wearing them down to nothing.

Until everything that happened becomes a gauzy veil through which that pale sun burns. But a sun, now, that is the source of no life; that drains life from the world rather than nourishing it. Just the sky, a blank and indifferent sky on a day just like other days. A day like any other, a sky like any other: you wait for me there. Patience, the land beneath the sky. The whole plain, waiting, and the sky above.