Dialectics and Real Life

A confession: I don't always like to write about things that I am experiencing. It's an ever-present inner battle between linguistic determinism and memory loss. To forget this moment, why that would be a tragedy, like dropping diamonds into a sewer grate. But to lock so much feeling and so much ... muchness into a prison of words... That too would be a loss.

They say the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is that in a tragedy, everybody dies, but in a comedy, someone gets married. I don't see any marital prospects for this little humdinger until I can remember everything, but the psychology textbook tells me that my memory will only get worse before it gets better.

Then again, the last time I was resistant to the power of words, the memory turned out to be painful rather than joyous. Maybe I should learn from that time and imprison this one before it has a chance to flay my heart open?

I guess, in the end, it doesn't really matter what I do. I've been complimented on my way of putting thoughts into words, and Leah even said this past weekend that if I published my journals, she would read them. I suspect that they are rather less exciting than she seems to believe, or perhaps they are more exciting than I seem to believe? Either way, I am bound because I want to savor my memories and chew every flavor of their bountiful array, but no one else can appreciate them as much as I do until I surrender them to phonemes and morphemes, at which point, they will be given to the world but lost to me.

All that, because every time I listen to Kristene Mueller's "Praise the Lord," I want to weep over the simplicity of beauty and the way Julia looked as she walked up the aisle and the way nothing is the same but we don't give up on each other we keep fighting and we take the pain because we know that "every lament is a love song," and maybe some day our love songs will not be laments.*

*Lament for a Son, Wolterstorff