memory as event
May 31, 2010
Early on in the ’63 session “On History” (was it Ralph, in transcribing the session, calling it that?) Olson and Duncan explain to Ginsberg that it is the event of language we are producing, and that is more interesting than the events of history, which, after all, can only be experienced here and now.
“Otherwise we’re simply getting caught in the event either of the society, which is one form of what’s boringly called history, or the event of ourselves, which is also that damn boring thing called personal history.”
So I’m trying to get a better understanding of how my mother’s “history” of her own life has largely disappeared and pretty much all she has is the here and now, but the present, for her, seems almost languageless. When she wants a word, it is an “historical” word that she can’t remember. In other words, the “event of language” ironically becomes historical, takes on guises of the past, and the cellness “which can decant total experience” deteriorates” (or changes) into a seeming silence.
Seems.
