Memory, Writing, & Consciousness

I wrote this a few years back and stumbled upon it today. I actually still like a lot of the ideas in it. Shocking, as I usually find my old writings completely intolerable.

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What I like about writing is the way that it swirls your sense of time. A good piece of fiction can make ten pages feel read like five minutes or fifty years. Poetry makes the heartbeat of everyday speech race, flutter, pause. Some would say that this is overtly obvious to anyone who has read literature—clearly orchestrated in the pacing effects of punctuation or the length of the words on your tongue. It’s more than that though. It’s they way the images of the imagination take on more than just spatial qualities, but also that certain metaphysical property of time itself.

My favorite pieces of writing have the same effect as a powerful memory. Those memories that flower so vividly in the mind that your eyes glaze as you lose consciousness of the bench beneath you. That snap back to the room with a start as you are shaken from the view of your memory’s kaleidoscope. Few things are more personal, and I would argue more valuable than these sorts of memories. The experiences are invaluable, especially as you move further away and they come closer and closer to resembling pinnacles of perfection. Memories are precious yet dangerous. Over time they tend to shift radioactively, aligning their plots to form all the better to the residual emotion retained in the memory holder’s murky depths.

That’s where writing is different. When you put the words down, they are destined to their exact presentation until you consciously revisit and stir them. A memory is assaulted by the constant, unconscious revisions of the mind. Something written preserves the moment of its creation, pinning down its images and sentiments like butterfly to corkboard.

I don’t know if I am the only one but if I wait enough time and re-read my writing, I am always surprised. Sometimes embarrassed by the honesty like a bad photograph. Sometimes pleased, but always surprised. I pull up a story I completed months ago, edited until I could not change another word or comma. Immediately I pick out and remove the pointless sentences that stick out. I reword the words of entire paragraphs like a Tetris game. I laugh at the stale ideas that seemed so brilliant to me at the time.

Writing forces the sort of personal growth that one must acknowledge to realize. Unlike our memories, which are constantly doctored for and by us, writing waits for us to reach new understandings before we can change it. In turn, this sort of personal growth forces writing. Time itself bends the elastic of our memories. Time gives us constantly changing experience, allowing us to bend our writing ourselves into whatever forms we have come to imagine.