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Suddenly it seems memory is impossible. Who can say what fills the coffin of the moment?

Richard Jackson, from “Possibility,” in Heartwall

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Zhang Yingnan  —  Come Full Circle   (oil on canvas, 2019)

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Remembering is like constructing and then traveling again through a space. We are already talking about architecture. Memories are built as a city is built.

Umberto Eco, from “Architecture and Memory,” trans. William Weaver, VIA (vol. 8, 1986)

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Grouper - Holding

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“What interested me was memory itself, the architectures memory constructs, the interpretive act of remembering. There is a passage in a poem by Alfred Corn which says it beautifully:

The idea hard to get in focus        is not how things Looked but how the look felt,        then—and then, now.

‘How the look felt’ was precisely what I wanted.”

Mark Doty, from “Return to Sender: Memory, Betrayal, and Memoir,” The Writer’s Chronicle (vol. 38, no. 2, October/November 2005)

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Solitude, descending the valley in calm, tell me to what wild wood, to what sea does forgetting go

Sara Pujol Russell, from “Solitude”, translated from Spanish by Noël Valis (via finita–la–commedia)

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A First-Rate Man-of-War Driven onto a Reef of Rocks, Floundering in a Gale, George Philip Reinagle (1802-1835)

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Where have the lost fragments gone? As I lie wakeful in bed what I see is a long corridor of closed doors.

James Laughlin, from “Those to Come,” Poetry (April 1996)

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Mary Lattimore & Jeff Zeigler - The White Balloon

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“Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. Moreover the writer invents himself [or herself] as a character in this form. He shapes himself from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned.”

— Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” trans. Clare Kavanaugh, Poetry (June 2010)

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Feng Yiming (b. 1965) 

Sound of the Valley

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One thing remained attainable, close and unlost amidst all the losses: language.

Carolyn Forché, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, eds. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, & David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995)  (via memoryslandscape)

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For Poetry Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

Jorge Luis Borges, from “Ars Poetica,” trans. Harold Morland in Dreamtigers

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The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.

Clive James, ‘The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life,’ The Guardian (26 September 2020)

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Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Elsie’s House, 1983 . Watercolor and pencil on paper, 20 x 28 in.

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Then you'll remember your life as a book of candles, each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee, from “Become Becoming,” in Behind My Eyes

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Do you ever recall these old memories at all? Do I ever cross your mind?