I’ve had this idea of cultural memory w/r/t individuals and the longevity of the importance of their contribution to it, good or bad or whatever. There’s an infinite space with time progressing, say, left-to-right. A person of enduring importance would start as a dot then continue as a bright line that flares up, grows brighter or diminishes as their value to culture varies. The line may continue on, brightly, to a great length. Shakespeare. Bach; well-respected during his lifetime, less bright for a century or so, then “rediscovered” by Mendelssohn and increasing in brightness ever since. Some are bright and diminish as they are in and out of fashion. (I know music and art best so…) Sigismond Thalberg was a pianist and composer contemporaneous with Liszt, well-respected in his day but little-known now. Little-known but thought of passionately by some; the Wikipedia talk page for Thalberg is lousy with fights on who’s the better, Thalberg or Liszt. I had gotten involved in the talk page a decade or so ago and… let’s say his adherents had passions. I would not have known of him if I hadn’t dug into Liszt’s history.
So we see these lines, bright and less so, with some lasting effectively forever. And for the rest of us, even those famous in our lifetimes, we’re a dot. Maybe lasting a little longer a couple of generations but no more and ending with a precipitous drop. And then there is that blackness.
I wondered what that extra space in between was. I know it’s only a space created by my metaphor/simile yet that construct created this idea of The Void where none exist and nothing is remembered. And it seems important.
A similar-but-different idea is when I think about my impressions of art and generally many things these days. It’s not that I have great opinions or ideas, but it’s that I have an historical and reference-rich impression of each moment. Even something like a scene from a sit-com is overfull with references. Like the bright lines above, I think of it as a line of my going through time and encountering these dots of experiences. With each, a string hangs down and the longer ones represent those with more varied and complex references. I feel like there’re more and more of those long strings of complexity.
Or something like that.