Hymn to Clio

One of the fictions of this project has always been the illusion of memory - the useful lie that I am somehow perfectly remembering a moment in time and then transcribing it. Sure, there are certain elisions necessary to compress the whole thing down to four sentences, but essentially it's just me calling up my memory of a moment or incident and typing it up.

But history was one of the muses for a reason, and that's why I said that it was "mostly true." Lying here on my bed, thinking of what to write about, while I did always write about something that happened that day, I was also always constructing it, from an imperfect memory, giving a shape and structure to the formless sensory soup that is being alive, and even if I went through my memory moment by moment, which I often can do for a given day, I was still having to give it shape, a plot or story if you will, to make it readable, unlike, say James Joyce or something, who was actually transcribing something like the process of thinking for a human being.