Have you ever wondered how memories are made? Where they’re hidden? Or how they can be recalled and what happens after we’ve discarded them?

Ask the Keeper of Memories.

The Keeper works in NoTimeAtAll, a spherical suspension bridge constructed of the thinnest filaments as sensitive as your nerve endings, linking the Past and the Present. Balancing in mid-air, she gathers whole layers and fragmented segments from the Past, then lays out the myriad assortment and prepares them for storage and transport.

The Keeper has a vast hoard of solid, liquid and gaseous substances onto which she engrafts our ephemeral remembrances. From a pile of threads, ropes, hair strands, and frayed guitar strings, she may weave a rough tapestry of our melancholiest days. From various oil and watercolor vials, she may add drops to a swirling pool, forming the vivid maelstrom of your first (or last) imperfect romance. From a bottomless beach pail, she may draw out unbroken cowrie shells or gnarled driftwood and lodge in their crevices echoes of half-finished songs or mementos of leftover regrets. From crystal atomizers, she may spray vapor to envelop the scent of an infant son’s milk-sweetened breath as he sleeps. And from a typesetter’s palette, she may combine glyphs and graphemes to recreate a crumpled note rendered unreadable by the salinity of tears.

She never runs out of these trapping materials; a second, even a millisecond, may be ensconced completely within whatever the Keeper chooses.

Once captured, these personal memories are ready for safekeeping. At her bidding, bank after bank of what appear to be ancient apothecary cabinets, with countless individual drawers bearing our names, surround the Keeper. Into these she stows her newest collections. Every seemingly tiny compartment holds a multitude of what each of us may summon from our Past.

Then, depending on her whim or upon my insistence or yours, she opens our respective boxes, scoops out a handful of its contents, and hurls them at breakneck speed or wafts them gently as bubbles surfacing to the consciousness of our Present.

In this way thus do we remember.

And though we all have good and bad memories, the Keeper does not discriminate one from the other. She welcomes whatever they may be, refusing to cringe even from the wasted moments of our lives. For the Keeper, no memory deserves special treatment. It is not for her to bother with the illogic of our thoughts and choices, the folly of what we have done and failed to do.

The task of capturing and transmitting memories never ceases. The Keeper is no artist: she is but an amalgamator. On occasion, she becomes careless, dropping bits and pieces of the armfuls she carries. Her mind wanders in those instances she longs to be mortal. Because the Keeper possesses no reminiscences of her own, all she can do is savor vicariously yours and mine as they nestle in her hands before she sends them to the Present and retrieves them upon their return.

And when we pass on, what then does the Keeper do with our cache of memories?

She saves them still, in reserve for the loved ones we leave behind, just in case they reclaim them on our behalf to make them their own.

Posted in: Exit Stage Write | | November 2007