Fervency in prayer by the power of the Holy Spirit is a good preservative against thoughts rushing in. Flies never settle on the boiling pot.
I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
If I'm thinking or feeling something, I have to record it somewhere. If I don't, I worry the thought will be lost and I'll never get it back again. I never self-edit and I don't write in one place or in a special book.
Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
He looks at one of the pictures for a long time. Then he looks at me. "I'll keep you up here." He taps his temple. "Where you can't get lost.
