79. Versions of a Conference
In the middle of a moment is where I begin.
Pieces accumulate but they do not cohere.
Seeing the words before me.
Relationships between things differ entirely
from relationships among things.
The temperature of the air around me
is the temperature of the water in the air.
An escalator buries itself deep enough into
the earth so that it might reach the subway.
We keep what we keep in the hopes that
whatever we keep will be kept longer.
The structure of memory resembles a net.
These are not random thoughts in random
sequence. These form an organized argument.
The view from our window is a wall.
It seems that what seems to be before us
is what we seem to believe is there.
People known but rarely seen, yet
they are great friends of ours who
have come a great distance to run
into us on the way someplace else.
If you found yourself in an empty room
and no-one else came there, would you
still create the metadata to remember it?
We seem to exist only during the summertime.
Night recollects evening almost perfectly.
By the time you receive this, you will have
forgotten that you didn’t know you’d receive it
or why.
This sentence refers only to yourself.
Laughter used as remembrance.
A poem should be a beautiful machine of words,
not a machine of beautiful words.
You might recall two weeks of summers
reduced to two weeks of night.
The tension between preserving and remembering.
It was a trick in the form of
a letter in the form of a poem
that refused to make sense.
In the form of which gracefulness you would allow consideration.
Everything writes itself, and we are forced
to live within the limitations it presents as ours alone.
Enough of us that we could not find anyone.
They call it an archives because “museum” was already taken.
In those hushed tones reserved for churches and the dead.
How we become obsolete through the natural process of living.
If we truly were archivists,
we would know this by now.
Accepting records with the understanding that
they won’t change over time but our understanding
of them will change with every passing generation.
Serious about our charge, teeth gritted.
Controlling the temperature to control the future.
A phrase that carried more weight than seriousness.
If this were electronic it would be forgotten by now,
or lost.
We do this to remember.
Pieces accumulate but they do not cohere.
Seeing the words before me.
Relationships between things differ entirely
from relationships among things.
The temperature of the air around me
is the temperature of the water in the air.
An escalator buries itself deep enough into
the earth so that it might reach the subway.
We keep what we keep in the hopes that
whatever we keep will be kept longer.
The structure of memory resembles a net.
These are not random thoughts in random
sequence. These form an organized argument.
The view from our window is a wall.
It seems that what seems to be before us
is what we seem to believe is there.
People known but rarely seen, yet
they are great friends of ours who
have come a great distance to run
into us on the way someplace else.
If you found yourself in an empty room
and no-one else came there, would you
still create the metadata to remember it?
We seem to exist only during the summertime.
Night recollects evening almost perfectly.
By the time you receive this, you will have
forgotten that you didn’t know you’d receive it
or why.
This sentence refers only to yourself.
Laughter used as remembrance.
A poem should be a beautiful machine of words,
not a machine of beautiful words.
You might recall two weeks of summers
reduced to two weeks of night.
The tension between preserving and remembering.
It was a trick in the form of
a letter in the form of a poem
that refused to make sense.
In the form of which gracefulness you would allow consideration.
Everything writes itself, and we are forced
to live within the limitations it presents as ours alone.
Enough of us that we could not find anyone.
They call it an archives because “museum” was already taken.
In those hushed tones reserved for churches and the dead.
How we become obsolete through the natural process of living.
If we truly were archivists,
we would know this by now.
Accepting records with the understanding that
they won’t change over time but our understanding
of them will change with every passing generation.
Serious about our charge, teeth gritted.
Controlling the temperature to control the future.
A phrase that carried more weight than seriousness.
If this were electronic it would be forgotten by now,
or lost.
We do this to remember.
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