November 08, 2004

"Dolls" and Memories

I watched a deeply moving and imponderably beautiful film last night--Takeshi Kitano's "Dolls." In the last couple of hours of a weekend filled by improvised improvidence, I was led away from my normal routine of diversion and back to a "place of first permission"--a state of being so clear that it reflects the world that it takes part in, this being nothing less than a blessing undisguised. The movie weaves together three seemingly unrelated stories of love that has fallen, but is always healing itself. It reminds me of a quote in which I often ground my thoughts, that love on earth is "the resetting of a body of broken bones." Kitano makes the settings of this 'resetting' effortless, timeless, and lucid. Slowly approaching Monday morning, I could not resist being swept into the current of this film, which is the same pulse running through our lives. Thus, I didn't sleep. I laid awake, listening to old cds, thinking of forgotten memories of love.

St. Augustine wrote about memory in a familiar manner. That we remember even that which we forget is a wonder and a paradox through and in which we must live. This might be similar to saying that the brash asseverance that one doesn't believe in God is a form of belief, merely with a translation of words to match the language of one's concrete experiences with the word and institutions that bring one close to or separate one from the mysterious and ineffable source of love, which is behind, below, beyond (whatever) the signifier "God."

Sometimes it seems to me like every moment of my life is an extension of an innate capacity to remember, and with remembering is an attendant forgetting: to remember this life and to forget the myriad desires for an "other" (whether it is a penumbral abstraction like 'success' or the Future, "non-being," or the void of the ego's dark secrets makes no difference). Remembering right now is the peculiar task of and choice to love--to resist the illusions of a futureless despair or the blind, weak, and unchecked expectation of a grand, self-attained apotheosis. Often we can see between these two obstructions, like the the wall that separates two lovers. If one surmounts this barrier, it is certain that what love has done by us will be apparent and clear. This is seeing again with new eyes a world that is never the same.

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