They talk about muscle memory, and I don't know how literally to take the phrase. Certainly the sinew that gives me my autonomy--taut like the singing strings of a mandolin or a guitar--is composed of ten thousand tensions, old stories, memories that fade. The chords are frazzled and a little torn. The music that was movement is impossible. So I just sit here and think about "before." Muscle memory. I try to conjure up the emotion and sensation of other times, of moments of action, of physical prowess. Maybe I am jumping off a high rock into the glacial blue water of a Montana lake. Maybe I am moving through the acrobatics of a passionate romp. Maybe I am dancing. The memories of the eye--the colors, the faces--are easily recalled, but the physical is more illusive. Living as I live now, feeling as I feel today, the clarity is not retained. I see everything through the lens of this loss, through this fear. "Before" is obscured behind my anger and sadness. But if I can't conceive of that place, how will I return there?
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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