As it stands

Happy New Year! …and Martin Luther King’s Birthday! …and Valentine’s Day! …and St. Patrick’s Day! …

Amazingly, after all this time, only 9 unfinished blog posts await revision, additions, content, refinement, wholly redacting, or sending to pasture.

I’m currently swamped with/overwhelmed by memory — possessed; a lifelong pre-occupation of mine without a doubt, even a topic, it could be said, for which I’ve nurtured and collected data, statistics, hearsay, libel, fantabulation and theorization about since as long I can remember.

Which, if you’re wondering, is roughly and reliably since age 11.

I’ve no idea how often it is I wonder abstractly about what is myself that is absent from my neural vault’s mutable archive of summonable memories. Usually, these thoughts lead me to wonder about everyone else, the monumental sea of consciousnesses which are other than me — or how it must feel to be a tree, what kind of awareness I, a tree, would have about myself and others like me.

I am drifting, sometimes calmly, sometimes nauseatingly, sometimes with a reassuring purpose. I am traveling the globe in my research — through reading about the science and chemistry of memory, the politics of archives, cultural tensions over a peoples’ heritage , the international negotiation over cultural and societal memories; and through actual travel. I will soon be in Leiden and Den Haag, briefly Florida and even Paris, researching the International Committee of the Blue Shield.

(Did you know that this years’ 16th International Congress on Archives will be held in Kuala Lumpur?)

So I cast a line out and this is what I caught. Buster Keaton poetically cradled by Radiohead (and some admirable editing, I should add). Helped me focus, and I hope you like it as much as I do. If all goes well, you’ll be hearing from me while I travel. It’ll keep me tethered, as it were.