The poison of memory is as sweet as the irrecoverableness of loss. Poison is the best medicine. Medicine for insanity. For unthinking. For the insanity of the unthinking that encircles us. Encirclement (in the military sense). Encirclement--the jaws of a trap.
Medicine is a cloying syrup. Not flight from, but finding yourself in the maze of memory. The work of an archeologist is to see palaces in the rubble and to reconstruct the past on the basis of paltry fragments. To make it the property of the present. To be such a person at the very least must be exacting and complicated. It couldn't be otherwise. That is, of course, one could let the past be forgotten and let the moss of non-existence grow. But that would spell poverty and barbarism.
The poet's path is to hear the strings of the primordial melody amidst the ruins. In the beginning was the word. Music is speech. Speech that hasn't yet named itself, unrealized and therefore not yet lost.
In the beginning was music. The world was created with it. On the sacrament of loss, a sacrament, for while we loose we do not deplete; by losing I make whole and acquire--the world was born on the sacrament of the primordial melody of losses. And there was loss before birth. For birth is a loss. And the infinite tenderness of this loss, this loss that gives, this giving loss, this abundant loss; it is tenderness, the tenderness of a return is precisely the harmony of power which holds the world together.
Our losses are the only thing we possess completely. Memory is the river of losses, lost moments, days, years, that have forever sunk into the all-embracing Past.