Ah, the sweet unhistorical, the sweet act. I venerate you. From your birth in my body, your bursting into my mind & soul, I forget you, but that is what you want, what you require of me. You are mine only when I do not know you are here, for knowing would drive you out. Thinking you would force you to stand still as the 'the possible act' amongst many others, and here, I know, contrary to those who revere thinking, you are only a shadow of yourself. Isn't love the highest of all; swirlingly here, giddyingly present?
My words do venerate you, sweet unhistorical, but they know that they cannot compete with you. They consecrate, but cannot act, cannot love. They historicise and memorialise, but nostalgia is the only memory that can really re-live and it does so because it is speechless. It acts upon you; it simply is, lived without consent or thought. Movement! it passes over and through you. You are surprised. Why? Because the historical, memory, has been made unhistorical. It has been made to live. This is its pleasure and its pain. I will not agree with our cultural fellows who cheapen it by saying that its pain is a wanting to return to history, to the 'good old days'. They make it pathetic and turn us into a gutless bunch, unable to face the future, clinging desperately to something unattainably past.
No, sweet unhistorical. I know that nostalgia's pain is precisely that pre-linguistic knowledge that one cannot re-live the reliving; it acts upon you, you cannot enact it. Ah, we somehow know what is un-articulable, we know it as soon as it hits us - that it will play through and be gone. It is only sweet because it is so. We are mourning the ending as we are loving the living. Who said? "my God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude."
My words do venerate you, sweet unhistorical, but they know that they cannot compete with you. They consecrate, but cannot act, cannot love. They historicise and memorialise, but nostalgia is the only memory that can really re-live and it does so because it is speechless. It acts upon you; it simply is, lived without consent or thought. Movement! it passes over and through you. You are surprised. Why? Because the historical, memory, has been made unhistorical. It has been made to live. This is its pleasure and its pain. I will not agree with our cultural fellows who cheapen it by saying that its pain is a wanting to return to history, to the 'good old days'. They make it pathetic and turn us into a gutless bunch, unable to face the future, clinging desperately to something unattainably past.
No, sweet unhistorical. I know that nostalgia's pain is precisely that pre-linguistic knowledge that one cannot re-live the reliving; it acts upon you, you cannot enact it. Ah, we somehow know what is un-articulable, we know it as soon as it hits us - that it will play through and be gone. It is only sweet because it is so. We are mourning the ending as we are loving the living. Who said? "my God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude."
