A SINGLE CALF IN THE HECATOMB

Sacrificial rituals of remembering

You must be dead, because before you lie the two rivers Lethe and Mnemosyne. Drink the one to forget and to be reborn. Drink the other to remember. Almost everyone forgets, the others go mad.

Before the blinding light is split
Through the prism of your organs
Into colors

Language—like its shifty passenger, meaning—is a process of elimination. Signification is the splitting off of a disparate, discrete part from what is experienced initially as a continuous whole. Some think this is why we can't remember early childhood, i.e. unlike us, babies don't chunk off the rich panorama of sense data into its component parts (if you can read this, sorry little baby, honeymoon's over). Language signifies the something, but the hidden move is to exclude everything else. Baked into the system is the sacrificial remainder.

Memory is the same. The gaps, the emphases and de-emphases make life intelligible. In the stories you tell your grandchildren, it's unlikely you'll recount the times you took a piss (although this number will be in the hundreds of thousands unlike, say, the 1-2 times you got married or that summer you almost drowned), and if you do, your grandchildren will grow concerned and their parents will start speaking in low voices. That's the point.

An excess of meaning is the same as no meaning at all. Welcome to the twenty-first century.