Autobiographical Memories

I read the new translation, and try to recreate an earlier experience, when the text’s artful magic resonated with the real magic of Christmas, as I saw it. Alone with a pencil and those pristine pages, I sat by the bay windows, seeing people pass while Gawain accepted the challenge. But we cannot re-live moments: my mind fidgets, hears the chat around me, cannot choose what to focus on, as it asks, constantly, what is meaningful? Whenever I read I want to write, but everything might be a waste. I acquire books which lack the magic of that pristine moment.

I held the book between my fingers: its thickness impressed me as I realised that knowledge was something physical. I tracked my consumption of these words, seeing where my bookmark had reached, using fingers to estimate if I was halfway yet. It was with me for months in France: I chose its company, on the bed in a strange room, instead of the family from whom I had alienated myself. “I have consumed that,” I told myself at last; and now the physical knowledge on my shelf daunts me, contains more than one life time is sufficient to even taste.

I only remember an anecdote: he played cricket in the morning, then emailed me that afternoon to say that every time he hit the ball, he imagined it was my head. What would a word like “guilt” add to this story, even if I had a right to use it? Anecdotes and terms are bland; they do not describe the real moment, what was felt. What I really felt was pride at my accomplishment; yet “pride” is another useless word. It means too much, captures none of what obsessed me as I ignored the History lesson, waiting for the weekend.

I could not bear to read it until I knew it had passed: did not want to see what errors I had hastily missed. The file sat, dormant, on my computer, while the hard copies (I imagine) were handed between offices, also dormant except for snatched moments when my qualified judges filled boxes. In bed, rejecting the impossible potential of my library, I re-read my words, their new status altering how I perceive them. Turning the page quietly under the lamp, while she breathes beside me, I pause to decide how I will inscribe this autobiographical memory in my collection.

Would the world be different without photographs, or would we simply replace those images with other charged idols, like clothes, coins, or glasses? What difference would that make to our preserving of the imagined, remembered ghost of a person? These relics will recede from the table, I realise even as I draw comfort from the shrine, just as the grinning lady in my other family is no longer at our table, even in conversation. I wonder if she is in the thoughts of the man I watched, brave, as they told her story; a man I already feel receding himself.