coming to the end of things that bother me: death, freedom, the self, etc. by galen strawson, i rush it some, i skip some heavy repetition, i want to get what he's saying and be done. he's very emphatic about life being non-narrative, and what i kept hearing was defensive, it's a long-winding protest, and i note that his repetition notes that he like montaigne has very little memory. i think of memory a lot, maybe because i forget so much, i've always felt mine (funny we say my memory is faulty, still call it memory, my memory) was slight or tenuous, except when it came to shame, shame has a long half-life in memory for me, also fear. strawson talked of the grey memory of dreams in childhood i recall too, mine the anxious recurrence, the effort to get somewhere or keep oneself from falling off the edge, or in my case rising up through the ceiling of my bedroom where i hovered nightly,  (glad to be held, to not disappear like a kite with no string). i thought g.s. was defensive about narrative, or non-narrative, because he has that kind of memory, loose, episodic, dreamy, anxious of story, full of fragments, disconnections, loss. what memory does is connect, though narrative may disconnect. what narrative does is impose, i think is what he means. ultimately life can be recorded in fragments, like montaigne did, but it isn't a story, it's life. what makes us want to render story from the confusing recurrence, that wants to capture wonder, or make sense. it's all so human, right? the story or narrative comes to supplant the life, to reconstitute life as memory, the narrative displaces the continuity of life while trying to represent life, to contain life, to control life, to preserve life, to say that this is life, this story, this self. of course we want to feel the shape of our life even as we know it's not possible to step away and see it, the shape we impose cannot contain the fleeting momentous reality. reality is intangible, maybe it's the infinite space beyond all stories.

i never could write a story. i always felt my memory was faulty, or at odds with my mother's, or history. i don't feel at all related to history other than being alive, witnessing some things. i felt history as something to be endured by living, by not living history.

as usual, i had something to say and now feel i said something that ensued from that, but isn't quite what i meant to say. and that's another thing i feel i guess, that life is the story in a way, of trying to write the elusive thing i want to say on each given day.

i write to allay anxiety. today, right about now, mister is going under anaesthesia. i wonder how much of our cogitation is devoted to simply passing time by recording, rather than simply waiting. the waiting can be insufferable. we have to do something with our mind, and even meditation is a kind of story to soothe the anxious mind.