Memory is all that we are,
and all that we are is what
we remember. These days
I often forget why I enter
a room as I enter. I’m forced
to wait on the blurred past
with its dead possibilities
to catch up to my present.
We sit comfortably couched
about the room. We confess
our stories again, shifting
scenes to allow for shapes
which differ, to be polite,
from others in other rooms.
(December 28, 2025)
“So many of us use when at our craft/of transmuting our life into words.//The essence is always lost.”
I have read three other books by Borges over the years: Labyrinths, The Book of Sand, and Ficciones. They have all been thought provoking and strange. I first heard of Borges as a fictional character in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” which makes sense as I finished “Dreamtigers” this afternoon. In “Dreamtigers” one of the themes Borges causes the reader to think about is identity. Specifically who is the real “Borges” (and us by extension) the one created by us that we present to the world as us, or the one that created the presentation. “Dreamtigers” is divided into two sections. The first comprised of parable-like reflections revolving around themes of memory, identity, creativity, and mirrors. The second section made up of poems, which touch upon similar themes and images. One of the ideas that have lingered with me after finishing the book is the thought that our unique experience of life which each of us possess and create though our life…vanishes as we die. “Events far-reaching envoy to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have supposed.” I know that this is obvious, but also profound. Nietzsche said that in the end we only experience ourselves. And Borges extends this with the thought that this individual experience dies with the life of the person. Unless as he says, the universe possess a memory. And even then, that memory is changed and erased by the future which remembers us in their own individual experiences. “There is not a single thing on earth that oblivion does not erase or memory change, and when no one knows into what images he himself will be transmuted by the future.”
memory agitates into vision media res: the precise moment of peak self-revulsion, the inaction, the cowardice, the lie inherent in regret— when nothing more could have been done, nor anything now retroactively applied which can act as balm to the shame carried for decades through the day in those quiet moments on the way to work, waiting for the light to turn green, or some phrase, or song on the radio which tumbles memory’s cascade through the spongey canyons to again reconfigure itself into this contiguous present as some other story without static cause
(December 25, 2025)
then there are the dreams
you do remember
not just wisps
which vanish forgotten
at fingertips’ ends
but the ones that cling
their razor tipped claws
toying with your heart
late into the afternoon
at the end of winter
(December 6, 2025)
My father’s ghost has returned
to haunt me after decades
of silence. I only knew
his decline; now, I’m learning
my own, a slow remembrance.
I’m no Hamlet; to avenge
his death, I would kill myself,
there would not be a question.
Telling that story once more,
I am what remains of him.
At night looking for water,
not as broken as he was,
I see him in the mirror,
frowning at me from the side.
My body reflects his own.
My mom used him as a threat
even after he was gone:
If you could be half the man
he was…if he could see you…
what do you think he would say?
She has been gone for years now,
while he hangs on the edges
darkly brooding as in life,
a storm always eminent,
on the verge of violence.
I saw my future at eight,
and a clearer past today:
his presence was an absence
always nearby, yet distant
like a shadow on water.
(November 16, 2025)
The ghosts have returned.
Along an edge, they tremble
into view, then vanish,
if I turn to look.
It is best I ignore them,
as they roll and tumble
near my hesitant feet.
I fear to step on them.
They are soft like kittens,
but with longer memory,
and a sharper clarity.
Details bend, slowly feel
their way, to insert tendrils
along darker fissures
to occupy spaces reserved
for conflicts of the present,
but now quiver gently
with decades of regret.
(October 30, 2025)
by
People try to talk to me.
I hear, perhaps, half,
then, as they go on, drift,
moved as if by tides.
Alone, most days, slipping
slowly from book to thought,
to roll my tongue through words
plays with incoherence.
There need be notes like stones
left as markers to return;
or bits of marginalia
tossed along the shore
to hint towards an origin,
I can no longer explain.
(October 24, 2025)
to fill the soft holes
the auspices
have left behind
for our memory
like tattered tarot cards
to make sense of
for our past to exist
in this present
dénouement
which of course
our future will
ignore as blasé
as conventional wisdom
bangs out a beat
on a tattered drum
we must insist
like the birds
how this story goes
(October 16, 2025)
I finished the Memory Police last night, but couldn’t summon enough energy to write a response. It was curious. It was interesting. It was ART!! Were there great lines and thoughts? Yes. Did it make sense? Not at first glance, which this response is. The novel (as the blurb on the back states) takes place on an unknown island where objects keep disappearing. Disappearing completely, even from the memory of most of the people on the island. Those who can still remember are taken away to some unknown place, for some unknown fate by the Gestapo-like Memory Police. The last sentence of the blurb says “The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.” I guess that is true, but only on one level. I would say it is more about the control of a community’s narrative; How history can be erased, and how we all just go along. How writing extends and saves individual memory for the next generations, who lose and save and create their own memories. How small seemingly unimportant objects can embody massive recollections.
Random Thoughts/Questions: None of the characters have names. There is a narrator, the novelist; the old man, who used to be the ferryman before the ferry disappeared, and R, who does not forget. The novelist is writing a novel, which sporadically we (the reader) get to read.Is the old man an allusion to Charon? Are the people who forget dead? The narrator is writing a novel, but loses her voice and can’t remember how to write. R, who used to proofread the narrator’s novels, keeps encouraging her to write, almost like editors who finish novelists books posthumously. Does “R” stand for reader? which is us, as we try to create meaning out of other’s incomplete memories?
Quotes:
“When I was a child, the whole place seemed… a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow, I suppose that kept things in balance… And even when the balance begins to collapse, something remains.”
“I have the feeling my voice may come back one day if I study the letters imprinted on the used ribbon.”
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“Memories don’t just pile up—- they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord.”
“Each one of us hides them away in secret. So, since out adversary is invisible, we are forced to use out intuition. It is extremely delicate work. In order to unmask these invisible secrets, to analyze and sort and dispose of them, we must work in secret, to protect ourselves.”
“Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them”
“When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself.”
This is how this story goes, or at least what I can remember from how Dad told it. I have probably told this story as many, if not more, times than my dad. Uncle Les had gone off to college in the late 1800’s. Every now and then a letter from him would arrive that first semester, and then they didn’t. My Grandfather Noel, Les’ brother, saddled up his horse and rode off to check on things. When he arrived, Les’ dorm room appeared as if Les had just walked out and would return any minute. He had been missing for several months. Then years later, around 1906, when my dad was three years old, a man came riding up to the “dirt” farm Noel struggled to eek a living from out near Liberty Hill. The man had two large saddle bags draped over his horse, two bandoliers criss-crossing his chest, and two large pistols hanging from his hips. The man was Uncle Les. After he dismounted, he walked into the house and hung his pistols from a peg on the wall. Les never touched those guns again. “Leave those guns alone, Ralph They’re nothing but trouble,” my Grandmother Pearl told the excited three year old. Les took his saddle bags out to the barn where he slept for the next 7 years as he worked for his brother on the farm for room and board. After seven years, Les took the almost forgotten saddle bags and bought a ranch out west. Even as children, we saw the holes in Dad’s story: Where did Les get the money for his ranch? Noel only paid him with food and a place to sleep. Where had Les been all those years after disappearing from his college? What had he been doing? After being gone for so long, why did he wait for seven years before he bought his ranch? What was in those two saddle bags? Was any of what Dad said over the years about Les true in any way? How much have I filled in the holes of my memory with conjecture?
(September 7, 2025)
It’s rumored one sees
as you die one’s life.
What if what one sees
is the life as lived
unfolding in time
so fleeting, yet vast?
Each momentarily
a live memory
not a life once lived
but the life you have.
Then it disappears
as if in a dream
of which one forgets
without waking up.
(September 4, 2025)
Memory, perpetually cloaked
in iridescent shadow, finds
itself a metaphor, becoming
along the way something
other, something momentarily
more accurate, than it ever was—
something easier, somehow,
in this moment,
to see
what was there once before,
to see
what was there all along.
As if instead of a tsunami
calmly obliterating the past
like a Japanese fishing village
washed clean from the shore
in a spasm of forgetfulness,
amnesia lifted thin silk veils
to reveal new aspects of time
no longer smothered beneath
the scent of stale mothballs
and the thick quilted layers
of familial consensus.
(August 18, 2025)
subtext 