CoinyWords

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

Unbelongers Syndrome

I sit in a library, the library of the world.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future. What would the parable of Lot's wife sound like in this case? We walk forward and enter the endless Elysian fields. I walk forward and become past.

The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave.

Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don't clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child.

It's well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers -- they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

A referendum on the past.

People suffering from this not only forget what was, but they are also completely incapable of making plans, even for the near future. In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the twentieth century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness, and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.

Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself? Shouldn't there be factories for recycling the past somewhere? Can you make anything else out of past besides past? Could it be recycled in reverse into some kind of future, albeit secondhand?

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn't put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go? Does someone buy them, collect them, throw them away? Or does it drift like an old newspaper, blown by the wind along the street? Where do all those familiar and unfinished stories go, those severed connections that still bleed, all those dumped lovers; "dumped" -- this word isn't a coincidence, a garbage word.