Singularities

Last night, after wrapping up the Blips and Ifs celebration of the launching of the bloglabel, I caught the 22 Knight bus to downtown Vancity on my way back to Tsawwassen. I had an hour to wait downtown for the next bus but I didn't care because I was full of bloggy enthusiam and sugar-free Red Bull. The half-forgotten faces of girls from history flashed in front of my eyes. Then in an illumination of hallucinatory empty city insight, Menalque's words from The Immoralist popped into my brain-hole:

"'If only our wretched brains could really embalm our memories! But memories don't keep well. The delicate ones wither, the voluptuous ones rot, the most delicious ones are the most dangerous later on. The things you repent were delicious once ... Regret, remorse, repentance - they're all former joys, reversed. I don't like looking back, and I leave my past behind me the way a bird leaves its shady tree in order to fly away. I tell you, Michel, each joy still awaits us, but must find the bed empty, must be the only one, so that we come to it like a widower. Oh Michel, each joy is like manna in the desert, which spoils from one day to the next: or like water from the fountain of Ameles which Plato says no pitcher could preserve. Let each moment carry away whatever it has brought."

That's why I blog. Because unlike writing an autobiographical novel, where one can summon and reanimate the corpses of former joys, a blog is written as things happen, and doesn't need to be revised later as our memories decompose into regrets. I want to write forwards, not backwards.