I Haunt Myself

Flanked on all sides by the failure of time to consolidate itself into a singular “now,” the image emerges: by dint of its inability to reach a state of plenitude in the present, the affective dimension of time is always a retroactive gesture. Here is the present: dormant, divested of a unity, sworn to its own secrecy. I’m standing on stones and the presence of the present is getting no nearer. Following this, I move. On its axis, the world falls back, receding violently back into the shadows.

Can we speak of memory as falling prey to the seizure of a death throe, caught thereafter in a state of artificial animation? Where am “I” in this process, that is to say: the real me? Of course, in the least we know the following: the power of place is not strong enough to wholly contain time without the side effects of contamination, rupture, and disease. Even in the sunlight, the broken rays of the past collide with the clarity of a given place: a city, town, hill, street, house, room, cupboard, or even the alcove of a drawer. Place breaks, and the discharge of time enters the scene. We are alone in this moment; nothing can draw us out of this localised death.

When do “I” begin? The answer is clear: when “I” begin to repeat myself, establishing a series of internal deaths that, while eroding the “real me,” nevertheless produce a series of identities layering one another. The neutralisation of the past, experienced when memory’s death throe reaches its end, is productive: it produces a temporal mirror. Referred to as the end of memory, this flattening out of the past spits back scatterings of old selves: I have come to haunt myself, and I do this through recognising the damaged space where the desire of the present once existed.

Here is the memory of insomnia: white noise, electrostatic, magnetic dissolution—a rupture in the solar system. I called you late at night, to seal a bond that the facticity of passing time had crushed. What were you doing there? As an attempt at bridging identities, the attempt was thwarted: almost instantly, the same moment fell from desire, becoming dialectically disfigured. I could no longer move my body, and yet the world persisted to move. The memory of insomnia: privileged as the double memory of falling upon its own exhaustion. In that coldness, the opportunity arises of not only being able to reflect upon the affective development of time, but also being able to experience the death throes of memory from the inside out.