Malevolent Memory: Days of Tragedy and Grace

I do not despise these days,
though I have reason to do so.

I have become fully licensed in malevolent memory though the operative purpose of such an affliction is yet to be adequately vetted. The masochistic application for licensure was far too barbarous by my assessment. In 4 years I have moved 5 times, I have lost a son, a marriage, a career, a retirement; the modest material wealth I had established; all investments once thought to be innervations of heart and soul, now deferred to higher reason, which is to say, an inconsequential assignment of value.
I am unsatiated in the evasive pursuit of a reconciliation between what I knew and what I know. The specters that dwell in the ether of my malevolent memory are translucent, shifting forms that mimic healing, melancholy, wickedness, and the occasional colic disposition of the vengeful, malignant spirit.

The sifting of my life is a Psalm to my soul; my cauldron is my hearth. To the wise who have long ago dusted away the debris of easy explanations that offend and disturb the mind, justice plays a small role in life. The wicked enter a courtroom to call good evil, and the innocent hesitates for fear of becoming like the wicked; a perpetual nourishing of malignant specters by the wicked and the innocent. The injustice becomes white noise to the backdrop of malevolent memory.

Mortal Truth our Finite Strength

Mortal truths seem to be Byzantine aphorisms we invent to move our minds from one attitude to another. These finite adaptations of strength are often cliches like good always triumphs over evil, time heals all wounds; do the next thing; justice will prevail in the end; Just do it; stay the course; absense makes the heart grow fonder. In the energy of youth, we prevail for a significant time under the power of our mental constitution, moving psychic states around in our head with the prowess of chessboard conscripts until deception overtakes us with the belief that we possess some kind of divine coping super-power. I find mortal truths to be, in general, the tacitly randomizing exercises of the mind to keep us grounded in our finite power without consciously revealing it as such. This finite strength is no match for the force of malevolent memory.

Immortal Potential our Infinite Strength

For me, the fertility of any mortal truth requires more than a mere repetition of words whose energy departed long ago. I remain quite null in their forsaken potential, left to the graveyard of dead aphorisms. A living potential arises in the letting go of their meanings and rediscovering them through Eros, the energy that remains forever vibrant; our life force. We bring meaning through our experience to engage language again in a new way. Eros is potential borne of the moment; a present glorification. Ageless and fertile, it demands obscurity in our attempts to know it, for if we could understand it, would it not devolve to a mortal truth? Another nullified grave of dead words?

Potential does not possess life until it is actualized, though I believe it possesses us until it is. The revelation of my potential was the forerunner of my own fertility and as it happens, the triggering apoplexy of the small-minded scavenger who protests my awakening. I spent a quarter century languishing in labor of my own potential. I am a recovering naïf; a man-waif emerging from an ordered and sedated existence, exiled in renewal. Naivety garners neither empathy nor sympathy, it is a shunned disposition for a male. The American generative man of strength is expected to have diluted masculinity, otherwise, he is labeled a bully. So the cultural assignment of gentle naivety in relationship must be accomplished, but done in such a way as to avoid being caught in the act.

I got caught… finally… thankfully… and it is an absolutely savage metamorphosis leading to what Milan Kundera describes as a nostalgic insufficiency, a severed state of attachment to a diminishing former life.

This bonfire of nostalgic insufficiency is a metaphorical requiem consuming the severed parts of my life; those pieces another cut away from me. The searing initiates the passage between finite strength and infinite strength. Transforming my fully licensed memory of malevolence to a memory in perspective. Moving me into a realm of contraries with a lavender haze. Nostalgia incinerated on the bonfire brings forth remembrances in the writhing smoke, taking shape like guiding specters of deeper nostalgias in a further past. Somehow in this passage, I am coming to know myself in a way that had been lost to memory. I am reacquainted with the neglected and forgotten; the nostalgia of me. And in this renewal of infinite over the finite, I find benevolent memory where the malevolent cannot prevail.