…The way that fossils are like the ordinary and are suggestive of the idea of “eternal return” — fossils are totally random moments of time that are kept (recorded) effectively forever.
..the fossilized moment is the superior of the non-fossilized moment– in the way that an unrecorded event from the past is to a recorded event from the past
…what is meaningful about a thing as it lives is not what’s meaningful about it as a fossil.
This came to mind as I had had a memory that seemed to me like the mnemonic analogue of a fossil –it was a memory of nothing at all extraordinary– like the fossilized footprint of a Stegasaurus, which is not the footprint of some amazing leader or genius among the stegasauruses, but some random member of the group who happened randomly to be walking in that spot
[… do records tend naturally to be records of the acts of famous individuals or ordinary individuals… do records, the act of recording, favor certain individuals over others… how does remembering differ from polling? (how do remembering, writing down memories, and polling differ?) might a parallel history, or several of them, be occurring…]
a memory of nothing extraordinary (like having a specific memory of taking a spoon from out of the utensile drawer, which I do most everyday, but knowing the memory of taking this spoon was the memory of a particular day, a day which was itself in no other way memorable)
a memory of a pile of leaves I saw a year or two ago around this time –nothing extraordinary about the pile –nothing extraordinary about the day on which I saw the pile– and not better remembered than a fossilized footprint evokes the thing it has fossilized– but recalled better than all the other leaf piles I have seen
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What was my one idea today: that two different nations could share the same physical boundaries, could coexist in the same physical space, be room-mates, like the U.K and France decide it makes more sense for both peoples to reside only in France, yet they keep their laws intact and the nations remain distinct.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 