Sunday, February 9, 2014
the splendor of false memory
I have a recurring image of a house set back from a certain strange street in El Dorado, Arkansas. A recurring image from my adolescence. The front yard was vast, with a curving driveway. I have a recollection of the interior of that house. I've never been inside that house.
This recurring image is a false memory.
In my false memory, my cousins Judy, Janet, and Terry lived in that house. In reality, they lived two or three miles away. They never lived on that street of overhanging elms and moody time.
There's a unique texture to this false memory. It's not like a stray piece of dream. It's even cooler than that. Wherever it came from and however it is that it keeps appearing behind my third eye are questions having to do with a dimension tilted away from reality.
This isn't past-lives stuff, isn't supernatural or Jungian. It's way more interesting than all that stuff. Somewhere deep in my head, a wrong house has decided to exist containing three wrong cousins. I really don't want to know how or why. I'm just glad it's there.
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That is absolutely fascinating! Really! Now, the only thing I have that comes close are dreams - of floating outside houses I have previously inhabited. I left them. And I always felt guilty leaving them. I had to teach myself to hate what I left. Then I realized, that's the guilt. So I had to be sure and love what I left. So in my dreams, I am floating outside my first house in the mountains, looking in from the stars. I notice the house is much better decorated. Same with the rural house in Newborn, Ga., the one just past where the cows spent the summer half submerged in a small lake. It's always the same - I want to reinhabit the house. But this is not about false memory, so please pardon. They say a dream of houses is about dreams of the self's body. I wonder if this could be applied to an interpretation of a false memory.
ReplyDeleteThey never lived on that street of overhanging elms and moody time.
ReplyDeleteThis post could be a portion of a short story, or it could stand alone. Before I remade myself as Corporate Cordelia (a necessary evil), at times, I inhabited such spaces more often than I did my own home.
A life lived weird is a life lived well.
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