I like the line: ‘An unusually hot summer stripped the memories from our bodies’ that you quote from Michael Kruger. I like ‘unusually’ and ‘stripped’ and ‘our’; it’s those words from which we can glimpse their story. There was something different about that summer, something uncanny that took us into a new situation. Memories are stripped from our bodies, like clothing, the memory clothing that identifies how we see each other and who we think we are, held together by shared and reshared narratives.
A bit more Sloterdijk: ‘”Man” comes about from the small number of ascetic extremists who step out from the crowd and claim that they are actually everyone.’
How do we know what we are? Are we a nothing from which we seek to be saved? Is that the trajectory of my life? Scrabbling with my broken finger nails in the the ungiving nothing that Sartre established as the ground of our freedom. My freedom was to start out on a barely noticed track that beckoned, that looked interesting.
I hesitate, slip down and somehow or other I’m bounding along on all fours, rather joyful it seems to me, perhaps even barking, pellmell down through the woods, free at last. A dog! Well I guess that’s ok; I’ll catch rabbits and tear their memories from their bones and then curl up under a bush and sleep through the dark times until the light of dawn returns.
