Love is the Silhouette that Remains
Finally some progress with the Moon Haze campaign. We've decided to resume on February 21. I expect that month to be a little busy - some friends are coming over to visit, it's my 14th anniversary together with K.M., and there's the UPLB Feb Fair.
As usual I'm struggling to come up with the setup for essentially a new arc for the party. I barely even remember things that have happened or have yet to happen: the most important details all foggy in my head, a swirling haze of the funniest bits of dialogue and unscripted power-ups and narrative detours, and the names have all but misspelled themselves and days spent adventuring have become irrelevant.
Alas, my DM journal, while somewhat functional remains unsorted. I look at my boxes of note-keeping with dread. Anyway, I'm sure T.(K.) the Druid would have a better record.
Times like these I'm thankful I keep a strict paper trail of the stories I've written. Remembering is a chore.
I was reading kamingawan's latest blog entry yesterday while waiting for replies to work emails. I wanted to send them a message right away because these bits resonated with me:
The reason I can't ever get tattoos is that if I got one for all the Interests I thought I'd love forever, I'd be covered in references I'd no longer remember.
Forgetting doesn't diminish the love that was there.
Then I promptly had to work again and send that message to the back-burner. I've always thought writing is an act of forgetting. Sometimes it's bad to let ideas occupy space in your head for too long - they must be expelled eventually, take form and life of their own, or else you'll run out of room. One ought not to stop with the mere thought of creating or you're in for quite the mental load.
Perhaps this extends to the making and assembling of art in general.
Perhaps this too can apply to its learning and consumption.
When the object of interest walks out the door of the mind, when at the present moment we open ourselves to other concerns, the remembering ends and the forgetting begins. Love is the silhouette that remains. The shadow of what once a demanding tenant.
Back in 2012 I wrote:
Is it not true that forgetting is our first human action? When we are born, we relinquish our bonds with the womb. From then on, we constantly forget. This is why we erect monuments and christen bridges - so these mementos could remember for us while we, convenient amnesiacs, stare wistfully into a future where our own names are etched in plaques and our faces carved in stone. This is why we scribble poetry in journals and make lists before we sleep - we want to seize what else slips with our tears and out the pores of our skins - to capture falling branches in a forest and the war cries of the waves on the shore, the crisp burnt scent of a moth descending by a candle flame and the vanishing early morning moon.
We scramble to recollect water and sand and wind that slide out from under our nails and the spaces of our teeth. How futile it all seems, when day by day our memories - of marked dates on retired calendars, of corridors on old maps, of peeling paint and palms, of surreal encounters with giant black birds, of the people in photographs we barely recognize to begin with - gradually perish, until we finally lie in our caskets, empty and infants once again. Perhaps this, too, is why we still attend funerals. It is a familiar experience after all.
In Phaedrus, Socrates argued that writing is anathema to memory. He tells of a conversation between a god and an Egyptian king, who muses that writing...
...will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.
The writer “sows gardens of letters” to prepare for a “forgetful old age”. These days old age means 33.
I know these passages sound critical or pessimistic, but isn't that a good thing for us, that our writing and the writings of others can shoulder the impossible task of remembering? I don't often think about what I've learned in Philosophy back in college much less the stuff I've published, but here we are - from reading a friend's musings towards the path of forgetting again, through my own blog, tidying up space and making room in my head so I can come up with my campaign's Monster of the Week. I didn't know I had these ideas in me until someone else reminded me.
And the shadow of love we felt from learning and creating is often the same guide that brings us back to those things, in my experience.
You may come across your former tenant in a busy street one day, not recognizing their face right away, but you'll say hi - even invite them back to your place - because they're the perfect shape of the shadow you harbor.
Side-quests Accomplished
🗡️ Built a Maralen Commander deck with only cards from the old Lorwyn block and the new Eclipsed set
Today's Stat Block
STR: 0
DEX: -1 Suffering from intermittent back discomfort
CON: +1 Hydrated and moisturized. Actually managed to eat a lot
INT: +1 Learned how to clip mask in Adobe Illustrator
WIS: 0
CHA: 0