The children of that era were never quite sure why they would do it. They would voraciously consume culture by the rice-bowl, spooning it up greedily. Raptors of books and film, music and general artiness. It was as though they were wolf hunting in concrete jungles, looking for meaning in the highest, widest most convoluted spaces. They were the Pacmen of ’stuff’. Their logic was rather straightforward and seemingly uncomplicated enough; find a piece of work, strip it, bare metal, down to raw meat, devour it hungrily, rabidly, desperately, look for the next item on their never-ending nonexistent lists. Rinse and Recycle. It’s good for your health.

It was pointless consumption. Conspicuous consumption. Consumption of attempted intelligent delicacies. In their masses they would copy and share and ensure that they all had their fill, their overfill of media. A media feeding frenzy. The feeding upon. Their insatiable worsening need for more. More Art. With their endless categorization and analysis. Division and Subdivision. New Wave Electro-Bass Quasi-Folk Tin Melodies. Sub-Surrealistic Raw-Conservative Typographies. Deep as they swam, they failed to realised the lack of viscosity in their surrounds, the diminishing density, the dwindling substance in their living mediums.

Their very acts of overindulgence in cult items were the source from which this black hole (quadrant two plus two equals what on earth do you know) was bursting from. The overabundance of information and their Faustian need for knowledge was chiseling away at their cores, hollowing them out. In those instants, they did not want to stand on the shoulders of giants. They wanted to be the giants; but what they should have wanted, was an even quieter sort of grandness.

“Though empires crumble to dust

and centuries lost in shadows,

the marble still sighs to the stars

‘I remember’ “

– Lover’s Gift I – Rabindranath Tagore

——————–

The weight of the memories are indescribable at best. Having a never ending depth and seem to stretch further back beyond the base of the eyes. They press upon the chest like a sleeper in the night. Sighing, softly, up rise, down fall. “Oh Remind Me,” Röyksopp infects the head with vaguely nostalgic words that echo as though they’ve always been there. These are the quiet hours, when nothing calls and the head runs dry. And full.

There are certain conversations that were meant to be remembered. They only occur so that you may retain the memory of that instance, that thought. You remember how you were both positioned, the expressions, the environment. The scent will linger in your mind, and you can swear that you can still feel how the wind rustled through the leaves on your skin on that strange afternoon. But you don’t necessarily remember the content of the conversation itself. That information seems, in retrospect, almost trivial and irrelevant. Like it was nothing but an excuse to have that memory. You may never recall what words were exchanged, or what ideas were born. And pity as that may seem, nothing can replace that ghostly remembarance. But you’ll never forget that that conversation did indeed take place. It will simply remain as one of those slipping sand memories you just keep grasping at.

Honesty; It’s the street dog that never died,

that lay afloat in the rising falling staying tide,

of floodwater stagnant, rooftops, smiled,

I played in the water, he whispers, I lied.

Away;

Staggering amounts of stardust have fallen upon large communities of hermits that sit quietly together, all alone in the vast wilderness. They were trying to remember the truth in their stories. The basis of their fabricated memories. Silently remembering. Earnestly, honestly, fervently trying. Unsettled reminiscing of all those half baked lives. Those frayed threads left dangling at the edge. The half filled vessels they forgot to tip out as they exit stage left.