June 12
That’s the thing of it there. My brother just wrote about how we err in historicizing, either by reanimating some epochal trait in some sort of grotesque charade that can only draw caricatures where portraits would hang, or by letting temporal gaps close up like scars over old cuts so we regard the mark & forget its cause. Either way, seems to me, there is a kind of valuation that goes forth, advertently or no. That act of separation, of differentiating either by the guffawing condescension of the present or, well, by its graver counterpart performing the same exact function. In any case, the past is set apart, fetishized, exposed ostensibly as a wake of obsolescence falling out behind us like the coma of a comet. The present gets privileged, in all the wrong ways. & the difficulty here is not that the past is passed; invariably, in the mere act of being, our recollections will perforce enact those reanimations & set those ghosts to dancing. Maybe the problem is that in thi