Memories

Memory (v2)

Il est vrai que, ces changements, nous les avons accomplis insensiblement ; mais entre le souvenir qui nous revient brusquement et notre état actuel, de même qu’entre deux souvenirs d’années, de lieux, d’heures différentes, la distance est telle que cela suffirait, en dehors même d’une originalité spécifique, à les rendre incomparables les uns aux autres. 
(I)

The Artifact:

Now that I am old
I consider these as artifacts.
Look!
Here is my favorite toy,
And here is my favorite [     ],
And here… a picture of me from then.
To remember,
One must strain so hard to remember,
For now I can only feel
A shadow of emotion
From that picture frame retreating,
And every day, a little shard breaks off that
fractured image.

(II)

The Tick of the Death Clock.

I feel my mind is going numb
And am neither really living nor dead;
A dying corpse 
In the slow erasure of all I was and is,
And there is something I am
behest to remember, but….
Tick tok tick tok tick tok tok.
Was that death clock always so loud?
That clock was an antique I bought
As a relic of those former times,
If I could just implant myself there in those former times,
Then I would remember.
But now, as my memory fails,
I must strain so hard to remember these things.

(III)

A Shifting Mirror at a Distance Shore:

The beach is a melancholy place.
The quiet rushes of the tide
Resetting the sand a new,
The cold glimmer of the sun
In its twilight beauty,
The waves crashing
Against the timeless shore.
Erosion ebbed away,
Leaving a little speck
From that heap of sand so cruel,
I never thought the ebb of time
Would be so cruel.
I gaze upon a distant shore.
My mind recalls in fragments
Something once so clear:
When my son and I had fought in battle:

² Hiltibrant gimahalta, Heribrantes sunu,  he acca do heraro man  gewapnoto gistuont efto her,  frago gote, quad he,  welihhes cnuosles du sis. 

‘I…. have grown old?’
My skeletal corpse gazed into the river Lethe.
A solemn glimmer rippled from its streams.
Such a callous mirror.
And there I forgot all I was,
And stared,
And saw my reflection in
The cruel waters shifting.

Footnote

Superscription from Le Temps retrouvé by Marcel Proust:
“It is true that we have undergone these changes imperceptibly; but between the memory that suddenly returns to us and our present state, just as between two memories from different years, places, or hours, the distance is such that it would be enough, even aside from any specific orginality, to make them incomparable to one another.”

² Hildebrandslied (c. 8th century CE):
“Hildebrand, son of Heribrand, spoke first, standing armed across from his son: ‘Tell me, young warrior, of what lineage are you?’”