Hi Hooopla,
I really liked your story. I like the way you use words. The voice is playful, strangely subtle & flexible. You want to laugh with this guy yet you wanna shake him up a bit too. I like the other characters too, barely introduced & yet you wanna know more about them somehow?
I read your story, then read it again. Then I started thinking about the relationship between memory, time, the mind & the senses. & the theory of cognitive dissonance too. It also made me think of 1 of my favorite novels. A certain passage. Being somewhat obsessive & idiosyncratic in my ways I just had to find that particular quote. I started rummaging though my books & found it. This is it.
Oh & before you read it, I just want to let you know it does have a semicolon in it. By slowing the course of their night, by dividing it into different stages, each separate from the next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance of a marvelous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory. Conceiving their encounter as a form was especially precious for them, since their night was to have no tomorrow and could only be repeated through recollection.
There is a secret bond between slowness & memory, between speed & forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera, Slowness
The different senses are each somehow related to memory. Of course I don’t really understand how it all works but it’s 1 of those concepts you can easily play around with if you like to do that sort of thing. I sometimes wonder if perception is a sense in the same way tasting, touching, seeing, smelling & hearing are senses?
I’m really interested in the way the mind works. The mastermind or groupmind process is an interesting concept to me. I do think it is often misused. Gathering together, sharing ideas, using the process to learn more. It’s a balancing act. When you gather a group who all think the same ('yes' men or some such) the results are disappointing (like the people Bush surrounded himself with during his terms). I think it was Lincoln who gave cabinet jobs to the 3 or 4 people who ran against him?
Anyway, I really did enjoy reading your story. I liked everything about it except the part about the white toast. Thanks. Respect.
