Excavation of Memory

Eight days passed and no ideas or imaginations struck me. Purely by coincidence, I found Walter Benjamin’s unpublished single-page thesis on memory. He proposed that one must begin digging, and come to find that Earth was never the one to give life, but is only a tapestry, rich with vegetations of memory. 

His words halt abruptly- it was clear he intended to write more- and in the inertia, I begin this piece. 

The idea of excavating a memory, of unearthing something significant or lost, struck me, or I struck it, with a spade I can hold. 

Benjamin’s experiment had echoed in my mind from time to time before I found his text. I envied those who were able to expand and watch themselves in the past, observing keen details, collecting what would become the gurgling soil in their veins.

I envied Anzi the most; he would elaborately report his childhood, his college days, his love affairs and his crimes to me, insisting that I write it all. I of course, never did. However, I would imagine him fishing as a child, falling into snake-infested waters, jumping on his way from school hoping to touch the leaves that are too high to reach, and wandering about alone. I imagined him with Rahul breaking tube lights with their bare hands while drunk, the way his face moved every time death visited his close ones, his winces and cries. 

I relished the stories he told me; each one sunk into my skin and spread like a garden. His roots coiled around my veins, and he splashed about in my bloodstream. I couldn’t help myself from playing out his monologues to myself, reminding myself of the tone and diction of his narration. In short, because of love, I shared his memories, although I had never experienced Anzi’s life, I found myself in the background of these visions watching like a quiet spectre. 

Afterwards,

I would often dream that he wakes up to the sight of someone he loves. The quenchful ecstasy upon seeing their face is only momentary. He cannot hold onto the joy of love long enough to realise that he must pull away, as the woman-visitor’s luscious teeth sink into his thick arm. Sadly, when I wake up, I wished that I was the one he loved, and I’d be instantly repulsed by my fantasies. 

I start fresh another day with a new dream; Anzi wakes up to a knock and opens the door to the sight of someone he loves, and once again she proceeds to cannibalise him. This time she begins by whimsically eating his face. The dream always began and ended the same way, but never failed to find its way back to me. There are no limits to the violence of imagination so Anzi continued to die again and again in my mind. I cannot help but admire his resolve, he may have seeped out of my pores and ears, but there are corners and crevices where he lies like still water. He is now more sentient than ever in my mind, in defiance of death, a deep and alert darkness. 

This is quite unfortunate because I still hold onto a very golden Sunday that I spent with Anzi; we were sprawled on the bed and the afternoon rolled by without a squeak or peep, which is uncanny of Sundays. I made a note to myself that love is eventless, quiet and pleasantly warm.

Such aphorisms for love continued to pop over the years, and I like to remember them. I remember them without intention, but as I do, they no longer sit separate like the strata of the earth. The margins of my love push the past into the present, and like a historical project, and I am constructed. Time cradles me in and out of my memories of him and each time I return to something rewritten. 

Beyond the separation of the body and mind, heartbreak severs shared memories. A version of myself sits unattended, in a plastic chair, on the veranda of his tharavaadu. If I abandon the aphorisms, I come to the simple conclusion that passed time is activity and activity means nothing. My meditations of memory these past few days, and writing this piece now, are all more activities, very slowly filling up the vessel of me. 

Tomorrow- nothing more than an invocation for the future- I will once again remember today- an invocation of me- and fill myself with revisions and regrets. I remember now when I said, “I don't know who the child me is, I don't recognise the teenage me, and the adolescent me is a different person. In short, I don't feel like one person.”  To this, he smiled sadly, because we wouldn’t meet again. We were surrounded by water and I threw my cigarette into it.

He said, “I’ve said this before. You don't think enough.” Then he proceeded to monologue, and in a couple of hours I would leave him forever. 

I understood what he meant months later; every estranged version of me is a stone, leaf or grime in my interior, they are each a memory amended. Together they sustain me, and my habitat is contained within my body; I sink from time to time, into the debris of my past but excavation is harder than expected, not because of what I find, but because it is not enough to simply find.