XII.

"Wer geteilt ist hat nicht mitzuteilen" - echoes of inhabited space. Why is it that the spaces we leave behind us is not simply still there as an absence? We move on, we grow, we die...we stray from the places we though we belonged, but others inhabit it, make it their own. Sometimes out of nostalgia we search through our memories and scrapbooks, but the past spaces are lost forever. We have stepped out of the frame, out of line. We would so like to think that we leave parts of ourselves behind to be remembered by, but we don't - we leave holes for others to fill.

But still these echoes of inhabited space haunt us; we can no longer reach them, but their ghosts speak to us, inviting us to spend a lifetime searching for them. Maybe this is the reason why some people want the freudian explanation: Not to be free from the grip of the past, but to be affirmed in its continued hold on our present reality. What joy to fall into these open graves! The words of the sermon at last giving an irrevocable meaning to the act. It is not pride that comes before the fall; much more mundane, it is only boredom.

So others fill our graves and take our spaces as their own, and even the hope of being fulfilled in death, of being finally immortalized in fragments, disappear as the marks of our steps on the pavement is being shaped and re-shaped by others we know not of. Even in waking and undying life we are again and again surprised that the residue of our presence lasts exactly as long as it takes for us to abandon it - not even an imprint is left over in its assimilation. 

The memories collide violently, giving rise to monsters; the impossibility of achieving any unity of identity is made all too clear by the discrepancies between the images of the individual left behind in the minds of the bereaved. The most we can hope for is resemblance in some form or another, but that will never give us more than a shadow of one we thought we knew. Thus we are twice bereaved. There is no legacy, only forgetfulness - and that, I suppose, is as much as we can hope for. Perhaps only by dying can we finally be split into a plurality of existence; but only as long as we face the fact that nothing of us will remain in this fragmentation. Just a name will tie them together - and what's in a name?