The Only Way Out is The Way You Came In: Five Ways of Looking at a Memory

[ed. note: this essay responds to 4 poems, only 1 of which is published here]

1. Crawl inside of the memory, deep inside, as though it were a cave you are exploring, undeterred by the bats and the dark. You are pressing on for the place where you can no longer stand, where the only way forward is to crawl through the damp rock and the only thing you can see is what is right in front of you. The thing in front of you is a sparrow in the rafters of an old gymnasium. Now you are able to remember, have found the way to speak.

2. Circle the memory like a burglar casing a house in the dark. Try all the windows. Find them all locked. Look around for a crowbar. Check your pockets and find them empty of keys. Lift rocks and look there. No one told you how to keep from losing the keys you once used every day, but you find that being locked out is a way of seeing in.

3. Consult an expert. Ask a physicist to make sense of memory, of all the people and forces in it. The physicist will fail. Memory is not science. But you can peer into the light let in by the gaps in his knowledge.

4. Study photographic evidence. Transmogrify vision into other senses. Hear a dusty old insult from decades ago. Smell the smell of a child who is now an adult. Realize how momentary photographs are, how they will always be incorrect in the present day, that they show the way things were, the way they will never be again.

5. Use memory as a mirror. Let it reflect back what was but also be the person who is looking in the mirror. Let the mirrors of past and present echo into each other, a tunnel of infinity. Wander that tunnel, looping back on your past self to understand the present self. Revel in echo, in dissonance, in wonder, in grief. Look forward and backward simultaneously in the tunnel of time, the tunnel of being, the tunnel whose mouth is your birth and whose end is your death. The only way out is the way you came in.