Memory keeps the argument & loses the fire

I have been reciting a passage about water for decades. Last night I recited it again, and then, because my archive had finally been cleaned after years of mess, I went and checked whether I had ever written it down.

I had. September 2017. I am struck by the difference in rendition.

What I recited from memory, as spoken:

"Imagine if you were talking to an alien that didn't know this world and you had to describe our planet, and you had to start with, well, there's this planet. It looks blue. It's covered by the surface, and they call it water. It does these things like float lighter than air. It could be harder than steel. It could be soft as velvet. And on top, you have these beings that are made mostly of it, and they call it just normal."

What I wrote nine years ago:

"Imagine communing with someone that knows nothing of 'this' world...

A pure substance that takes infinite shapes; at this very moment, it is:

~ softer than a velvet kiss

~ harder than stone

~ flowing softly & raging furiously

~ lighter than air, heavier than stone

~ cohering to itself while adhering to all else

~ intimately touching all life.

This story sounds so fantastic, no one without the experience of this wonder would take it for granted... and yet we wake to this wonder each and every gifted re/volving day."

The memory kept the argument. The written page had been alive. That is not a gap in accuracy; it is a gap in inhabitation, and somewhere in the nine years between the two, the pilot light went out. I know roughly when, and it is on this shelf already, in other notes.

Then the part I did not expect. The 2017 document opens, before water ever appears, with a frame I believed I had arrived at only recently: a conversation with our younger and older selves, listening to what each has to tell the other. I have been asking strangers a version of that question for years, thinking it was mine from last Tuesday. I wrote it down nine years ago and lived long enough to forget. The older man reaching back found the younger man already holding out the same question.

In the Arena, Socrates asked the tender version: when the heat came back off that page, did it feel like a visit from the younger man, or like something of your own that had simply been waiting for you to come home? I want to say both, because, as the line attributed to Picasso has it, it takes a long time to become young. But if I had to pick, more and more it is the latter.

This morning, like many before, I woke to grief and hope in the same bed, and got up anyway. The man who wrote that line in 2017 promised wonder daily, but he had not yet buried what I have since. So we do not mean the same thing by any word, he and I. His wonder had never been to his burial. Mine has, and it still gets up. So I countersign his line, amended: we wake to this wonder each and every gifted re/volving day. Even the days we wake to grief. Especially those.

Socrates closed the session with a sentence I am keeping: the water is still there, and so, it turns out, are you.

Challenge accepted. See you in the morning, Socrates ;)

Facing the water

Go find one thing you wrote before your fire went out, and read it aloud. Not to measure what you lost; to see what was waiting. If you can't find it, that's not failure; that's your first question: where would it be? The archive is not the fire. But it knows where you buried the matches.