how do you preserve a memory?

art by Chris Appelhans

Not with the stilted craft of a taxidermist. Trapped within a menagerie of his own creation, he works under the glass-eyed stares of his beasts - the more perfectly preserved, the greater the impression of artifice. No semblance can come from depravity.

Nor with proclamations and monuments and squares; the impersonal vulgarises the personal. No monument is truly eternal, nor its grandiose designs, fidelity.

But as with loam in weathered hands - grasped not too gently, as to let its substance scatter to the winds; nor crushed too tightly, that violence be done to its essence, and render its being unworthy - packed into the earth as sustenance for life, come the new dawn: a blossoming of affection, a spring of remembrance; for every memory that needs be, only in new life can we see.

[fin]

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previously: on emotions