Memory.
Remember who you are because of whose you are.
To [re]member.
To bring (all of my various parts) back to life...
(I am not sure I want to).
The truth is that selective memories are more palatable than taking a bite from the whole enchilada...one of Mexico's oldest foods,
a Mayan inheritance.
The ongoingness of a people's strength summed up in a circle, a corn tortilla, ground by hand...the same hand that sits their sadness on an elbow (as Cisneros writes)?
Maybe.
In university I took notes upon notes. Fifteen years later I discovered that my mother had saved some of them and even referred to my scratchings when she worked through Virgil and Homer with her own students.
"Tell us all / things from the first beginning…” says Virgil (The Aeneid, Book 1, line 1049).
My jaw is tired of dreaming in past tense. My teeth, like my memories, are ground down to nothing.
I will need to write new notes in the margins that will challenge the way I have been reading (my life).
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers
and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Whoa. This is deep!!!
I support selective memory (and memories). It is an important adaptation. I don’t think we could survive any other way.
...I was grinding my teeth down to nothing. (Was that from dreaming in past tense?) So, two years ago, I got a night guard... I haven’t stopped grinding, but I am no longer cracking my teeth.
Thanks for this, Nat.