Weekends in ParadelleForgetfulness
I did not post on Friday. Forgetfulness? I suppose, combined with Life imposing other things onto my daily calendar.
It happens. In his poem, “Forgetfulness,” Billy Collins is focused on how memory weakens with age. I can identify.
My habit of rereading novels that I enjoyed in my youth and finding them to be new material is said by Collins in this way:
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
It’s “normal” when you get to a certain age to be more forgetful. (What age? It depends on the individual.) I accept that, but I try very hard to concentrate and bring back that forgotten thing. “Don’t tell me,” I tell my wife when I can’t recall a name or word. I want to force my brain to make that connection again. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes.
As Collins says, “Whatever it is you are struggling to remember / it is not poised on the tip of your tongue.” Where is it? Like the lost car keys, it is somewhere, and I feel that I should be able to find it. The poet is not as hopeful.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
And Billy ends with my greatest fear about my memory and my aging brain:
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
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