July 23

Wordsworth noted how recollection is always a form of reanimation—a breathing-into that conjures into dance the ghosts of the past. The idea was to direct one’s contemplative focus in an effort to recreate whatever circumstances seemed redolent with meaning, & to conjoin the present mind with the newly animate whilom feeling in a coeval creative effort. & so a childhood excursion across a meadow of tall grass, a leaf’s spine stuck in the sedge of the Thames, or a visit to France, or the death of a friend years ago, or the faintly lingering acrid sweetness of a flower pedal long since turned under in the loam & soil. & it would seem that he earnestly believed that the two could come together without compromise, or without enough distortion to merit fundamental suspicion. & maybe as a matter of forging a poem, forging his poems, that can make sense—if that particular faith in the sameness of what is past was what lent his better work its spark, it’s a trifle to dissect it. After all, wonder inhered, word to word, & the bygone world sparked to life in the better poems retains still some of its distance, of its irretrievability, which seems somehow the important thing. But still the thought of that continuity grates at me. That assumption of totality, of life as a narrative strung catenary from identifiable cause to quantifiable effect. & meanwhile, the ghosts in us will do what they will do. Our memories will rearrange, dissolve, & the categorical hold in which they are harbored, too, does something very much the same. & the past apparels itself in varied hue under the shifting gaze of the present, such that it is, it would seem, entirely reconstituted with each experience. (Thus Eliot in “Tradition & the Individual Talent”). & so how odd, then, to see the chasm widen between what was felt enduringly in the presence of another & what is felt now. How surreal to witness that slow growth, & to find its old stories unfurled, its old pages weathered & yellowed, thick with swelling rain. A becoming or a having-been, & maybe it’s not that we choose so much as that we listen more acutely, or learn to, or hope to learn to. That we read our pasts differently from our shifting vantage, & find that in the absence of that particular vitality that we only feel in the actual experience of things, our relationships with what has passed become less eschatological in their induction. & with that halo relieved, we seem them plain & plaintive, closer, perhaps, to what they were underneath the burning design of our desires. & we breath & breath, but find no ghost with arms akimbo, no tableau suddenly reanimate, no unbroken chord in protracted resonant harmony. We don’t want to believe the ruptures of our past are finite. What we retain in memory we believe is dually retained in the actual world. But it is not our world to tend, & it is no mirror to us besides. & its song is neither elegy nor dirge nor crafted thing at all but the same slow quiet of something passing beyond our grasp. & we can gain its access, but only just so, only for a moment, only as an inaudible gasp in millions of miles of untended wilderness. & where, then, our fictions?