FOREVER

(READING MORE STUFF FROM ROOKIE.) 

THINKING ABOUT MEMORY + INFINITY. 

WHAT IS INFINITY? HOW DO WE PRESERVE INFINITY? CAN WE PRESERVE INFINITY? 

IS THERE ANY POINT IN TRYING TO STOP TIME? 

(i particularly like THE IDEA OF AVOIDING DEATH OF THE MEMORY BY DOCUMENTATION)

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• ON INFINITY 

incapable of accessing an aerial view, infinity moves both ways........

 Infinity= time that moves in neither direction 

"Infinity means you’ve stopped watching yourself, or watching others as if you don’t belong with them, and maybe being that inside of it means limited access to the picture frame, Polly Pocket dream-house that you get to hold firmly once you’ve turned something into a story.

I guess Infinity is like what psychologists call “flow,” when you get so focused on something that everything else kind of falls away. Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott used “transitional space” to describe the unquantifiable dimension that opens up in play, sex, and other feeling-not-thinking activities. 

Polymath Michael Polanyi coined the term “tacit knowledge” in opposition to explicit knowledge, so that we at least have an articulatable distinction between what can and cannot be articulated"

• James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room:nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached…”

"we’re happy free confused and lonely at the same time….It’s miserable and magical.” - 22, taylor swift 

Richard Maxwell in Theater for Beginners:
 “Maybe genuineness refers to the collection of our conscious and unconscious facts-the act of thinking and immediate impulses, both controlled and uncontrolled.”

• Marguerite Duras’s The Lover:

 that’s what he ought to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes….”

• “The greatest human action or endeavor we can do is get past ourselves to touch someone else in a real way.”  - toni morrison 

• ON LOVE 
• Connection is different from approval or validation, and so much more lonely-conquering.

Miranda July’s The First Bad Man:

“Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.”

From Emma Cline’s The Girls: 

“There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles—just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed.”

“The Young-Girl resembles her photo.”

“The Young-Girl does not love; she loves herself loving.” “Between the Young-Girl and the world there is a window. Nothing touches the Young-Girl, the Young-Girl touches nothing.”

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.”
.............."So somewhere deep inside me, the seeds had already been planted—by movies, books, songs—and it took just one pleasing detail for my internal world to flower.

• ON STOPPING TIME 

"a little drunk with the superpower of recording her own version of life"
"the immortality it promises"
"an incapability of letting the past dissappear into the ether means living among fiction

I WOULD LIKE TO STOP TRYING TO CONQUER DEATH BY DOCUMENTATION 

"I’ll call this a diary, but of course I know you’re there. I don’t know if I ever intended to keep any of this to myself."

"a generation of people who actually are sharing everything exactly as it happens, how much slow suicide takes place in the careful curation of a personal brand, how much we limit ourselves by deciding who we already are"

 if your legacy makes any difference to you when you finally lose all consciousness, does commodifying everyone I meet into a fictive character diminishes the potential for love? What was I closing myself off from by trying to decide what everything meant as soon as it happened? While it was happening? Sometimes, even, beforehand ?

• Didion believed that, as a reporter, it’s more honest to establish who you are and where you’re coming from than to even try and mute the inevitable bias. If subjectivity is inalienable, memoir is a form of fiction. Writing about one’s life without ever revealing oneself or anyone else to occasionally be an ass isn’t writing; it’s branding

• “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion characterizes notebook-keepers “afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

• Sarah Manguso in her book Ongoingness: “How ridiculous to believe myself powerful enough to stop time just by thinking.”

• Barthes’ characterization of loved ones in a photo: “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies