I was talking with a friend the other day about how difficult it can be to maintain coherency when telling stories that exceed our short term memory span. We are so firmly accustomed to thinking of time as linear that we grow muddled while retrospectively attempting to order the events of our lives into straight lines that adhere to some sort of causal structure.
i.e. Event A: my brother broke his hand while snowboarding. therefore…Event B, C, D, etc.
This is a story I tell a lot, but telling it in order removes all of its zest. Especially since i think of the day my older brother Josh broke his hand while snowboarding as a triumphant day because it was the first time I got to say I was arguably better than him at something. Because how he broke his hand is the best part of the story. It wasn’t a fall, oh no, he fell way too many times that day to count. On the last time he fell, though, he got so mad that he punched the ground. Unfortunately, the ensuing crack wasn’t the ice (eek cheesy).
I also happen to think of that day as the day Josh more or less disowned outdoor activities (I would try to preserve his feelings, but he almost certainly won’t be reading this). But all these sweeping generalizations are the result of my retrospective attempt to make meaning of the events of my life, or in this case, Josh’s. And I offer this as food for thought, a comment brought up in my memoir class: are we even allowed to retrospectively assign new meaning to the events of the past–to feel differently now about something that happened to us than we did when and while it was happening? I would argue that if time fit neatly into a linear model, then maybe not. But it doesn’t.
Looking back on my past, to me, is sort of like walking through the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter (sorry if that shuts doors for some of you, but Google is always kind in times of need); some memories stand out more than others, like the shining glint of gold amidst a sea of mundane objects. While the opportunities for analogy here are endless, my point is this: our memories are programmed to code meaning–resonance, salience–on a higher level than order.
Now maybe that latter statement feels obvious, but I think it’s an important point to keep in mind. Our stories are made richer by the fact that we can pull so many different bits and pieces of memories, from all different times in our lives, to create the perfect, laughter inducing tale to tell at cocktail parties.
And this was all to preface my attempt to communicate my thoughts from last Thursday as last Thursday was the first day of the semester that I was doing so much thinking that going to class actually felt like an inconvenience.
Instead of ordering all those thoughts for you, I decided to let you see everything for a change. When I’m a little fresher, maybe I’ll come back and try to put them all together. For now, here we go:
From Thursday February 20th:
I can never decide if writing for me is a compulsion or an honest act of self-expression. I think mostly I’m just more visual than I realize and I need to see all of my ideas expressed and existing in physical space before I’m able to evaluate whether or not they’re worth any more of my time. Actually, scratch that, I’ll keep the sentence because it sounds nice, but the truth of the matter is that I’m extremely visual, I just happen to anchor my thoughts with words. I had to develop the extra wherewithal to make those words move. Some days I think my life would be a little easier if I could draw or sing or execute lengthy, dramatic monologue. But alas, I can write. I’ll work with words, though. They have immense, hidden powers that are great fun to uncover.
Still, static and dull writing is the stuff most academia is made of and it’s why I struggle so thoroughly some days with the realm of higher education. Also, note my lack of coherence and clarity here; I’d like to make a point about it later.
Because today, I was caught off guard by a strand of new thoughts. I wanted to follow them where they led me. I got another cup of coffee.
When I surfaced from my initial reverie, it was 10:35…five minutes into Style. I gathered my things and fled to the dingy conference room clear across campus so I could learn about how to compose prose with elegance and grace that emulated a deep coherence and cohesion.
And the morning began like that, with the tug of a thread that quickly began to unravel. But instead of spinning tales all day I had to go to class.
I kept writing anyway. The following are copies of notebook pages from the day, representing the progression of my many thoughts.
P.S. Since I know my Mom will read every word (<3) I feel the need to apologize for the light “French”.
P. P. S. I’ll be back in a couple days to make sense of all of this. 
Centripetals 
