call for submissions: PERFORATIONS 15

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:

Memory and its Dislocations

Memory. Is there anything without it? Thought, action, love, morality, community, family, the state, subjectivity, all require and rely on the ability to relate what is no more and yet has not disappeared with what is not yet but is on the way: 'past' and 'future' finding their only existence 'now'. Sometimes comforting, the past (which in some form is always still here--that's why we know it's the past) seems most often these days weak and spiteful or alternatively a fractious and vexed tyrant, Eurydice-like in its beckoning us back, promising redemption yet ultimately trapping us in its labyrinthine corridors. The balm of continuity that the past once offered (was it ever thus? or only another turn in the labyrinth?), a genealogical covenant with both time and space, seems now more honored in its breach (and AS rupture) than its contiguous states. Even matter, though as obdurate as it has always been, seemed to be resigned to its performance of decay (and even the perennial gnostic wink--*performance* of decay--we could live with, as some misty object of devotion behind the scenes that some folks could wrap their abjection around).

Memory was the great stitch suturing matter and flesh (never quite coincident with each other) with however the heck it is we can KNOW anything. But now memory seems simultaneously, and contradictorily, as porous as a sieve and yet strangely mutable to our desires. The *performance* of consciousness as it turns to those beckoning cries from the cave (heard faintly over the roars of the concrete trucks as they dump load after load, attempting to fill that unfillable archaic void): we remember things that never happened, we forget events that MUST have happened, we alter events that did happen. We are increasingly abducted by our own brain as it eviscerates itself, starfish-like, cracking open its evening meal, squirting its stomach into the meal, rather than viscera versa, everything sucked/blown into our electronic/technical apparatus. Everything, including memory, now spawning its uncanny, shadowy double while, laser-like, memory is pumped faster and faster between the opposing half-silvered doubles of birth and death (perhaps proving eventually they're not as opposed as we thought, maybe only memory making it so).

False memories, implanted memories (aren't all memories implanted?), memories of the future, traumatic memories, memory lacking the necessary immunological agent to protect itself, the overpowering presence of the archive (and yet, we now see, remember/make-up, it's unavowable duplicity), it's density gone hypersonic (and tachyonic?) as it meets its electronic self.

The next issue of PERFORATIONS will be written on soaked madeleine cookies. You are welcome to take a bite, cook a batch, remember your first morsel, forget your last.

All projects, poesis, phronesis, catharsis, morcellations, proposals, memories, forgettings, rumours of the Fall, courtiers to the crash, breach babies, neurological scans of your frontal lobe, your past life regressions, your carrot at the end of the stick, your lacano-freudo-nietzscho-mastications of the memory nodes and their favorite dump--the 'culture'--are welcome as always.