Cold cases are hard to solve.
There is an event from long ago, now hidden and washed by time and history, that made us who we are. We fought, we laughed, we cried, we survived—something bore deep into our flesh and froze a seed of motion and mind forever...until it didn't.
Until it wild-water rafted into the present, buoyed on waves of sludge and memory. Like Einstein's gravitational waves, the weight of these mental mausoleums so distort our fragile neural spacetime that we are helpless against the current.
On better days we call it...Memory.
Hannah Arendt said in a 1960 essay, "I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which at least for ourselves, contain in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say . . ."
I came back here to Portugal to unearth that nutshell.
30 AUGUST 2022
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