comet-memories  From “Leaving Australia” Terrell Neuage

 

We know so little about the ‘way it is’. There may be an alternative world of ‘frozen memory’. Like comets are frozen cosmic thoughts visiting within our perspective before going off past our solar system to gather more information before returning to within our perspective sight. Each moment we have becomes a comet-memory and goes into orbit, entering our consciousness at random times as memory. Within the comet-memory is contained everything from the memory sequenced. For example, a time when I was shopping with my children at Grand Union in Clifton Park, March 1992, still exists as a sequenced comet-memory that has just entered the orbit of this moment’s consciousness and not only am I able to write about it but I can close my eyes and see my children and me walking through the store looking at stuff. “Oh look there is me picking up a block of tofu, and there are my children looking at toys – I better tell them that we don’t have the money for toys now.”  But I can’t because the memory has already been frozen in place and is sequenced. The memories seem isolated. I can pick one and hang it up on my tree of thoughts like a Christmas ornament – I have a well decorated tree at the moment with lots of memories hanging there just waiting to be looked at, entered, re-lived.

Even now as I sit here in Round Lake, Wednesday, September 02 2014, 2006, 10:15:50 AM I am creating a new memory-comet that will go into orbit as soon as I leave this task and go off and do the next thing. For example, I will leave at noon and go to the gym then to Albany University and prepare my class. I will send an e-mail to my wife, who is visiting her family in South Australia this week, and tell her I love her and that all is fine here in New York.  This is a good moment and I am sure I will visit it again. Not because my partner is away. Not because the first day of spring was a couple of days ago. This is a good moment because I am typing on Leigh’s computer and I have photos of Sacha and Leigh in a field at our Mt. Compass farm and there are a couple of print outs of pictures of Southern District Baseball Club where Leigh pitched from hanging on the wall in front of where I am typing. Just as if I was there again or even, still there. I can enter those pictures and throw a ball with Leigh or walk through the paddock with the boys and make the cows run. It is a good moment because I am visiting memory-comets that are passing through my life this moment.

Sacha and Leigh > comet-memory  ~ 1997 Our farm on Tooperang Road, Mt. Compass