Wandering Thought # 110

The moments and experiences that turn into memories and persist within us are always the ones that carry an emotional weight. The rest of the things we go through we do not remember or recall. So our memory and recollection of the world is always subjective, reflecting ourselves and set of emotions and being in that particular moment, the person we were at the time. But, also, the memory which persists within us is not a finished memory or a static image; it changes within us as we change, for the memory itself is always grasped and viewed through the prism of emotions and thought, our growth and maturity, which are ever shifting.

It is not always the experience we go through which creates the memory within us, the opposite can also be true. Some emotions can be so intense that they generate a set of images and feelings that acquire the hue and shape of reality and thus persist within us, becoming more real than reality itself. That is how artists, in particular, grasp the world. But what is true for the artist is also true for the “normal” person. Memory and image making are no passive activity but a creative process that goes down to the very roots of our being and idea of the world. The person is both generator and creator, grasping reality not as a fait-accompli, but always creating it out if the prime material the world and our situation within it provides. In the truest sense, “we are the poets of our lives.”

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Wandering Thought #98

All poets are fools; they love the world more than it deserves to be loved, and when it hurts them they bless it. All poets are fools; they inscribe their holy verse in a woman’s body, and turn her into mist and light. All poets are fools; they are meant to suffer, and enter a place of light. All poets are fools, they bless what hurts them, and love with a passion that rivals the sun. All poets are fools; blessed are the poets.