relevancy XLVI

Perhaps poet Robert Penn Warren put it best when he wrote that people really don't want to remember their actual past if it had defects, that they have to manufacture a new one, that they need a new one, that we need to believe we were good and righteous before, even if we were not, in order that we can be good and righteous today and tomorrow. "Inevitably, the past, so far as we know it, is an inference, a creation, and this, without being paradoxical, can be said to be its chief value to us. In creating the image of the past we create ourselves, and without that task of creating the past we might be said scarcely to exist," he wrote.


- Bruce Chadwick, 'The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film"





Half of the time we're gone
and we don't know where, we don't know where


- The Only Living Boy in New York, Paul Simon





his voice on the phone betrayed control or reticence so that
you might have assumed you had disturbed him at work.
but actually, he said, he had been sitting by the phone all
afternoon waiting for the call.
the words squandered, he said, in our family that is,
wastefulness, this goddess that all have always fallen prey to.
so why not me.
without a trace, he said, self-abnegation.
each family, he said, thus has its own christmas tradition.
landscreen, he said.
as if we were speaking different languages, localities.
different localities, he said, so that in the end you no longer
know what is right.


- last lines of 'four o'clock deep in the morning' by Friederike Mayrocker.