Two men, potentially in love with the same woman, a woman who in her hypothetical objectivity is a continuation of the one woman with whom a single man, in falling fatally in love with her, finds himself united with a league of men in tragic conflict with the ruinous indifference of time and its sands - these two men who are friends by fate and ignorance alike, drink a wine given to one to give to another with a message of redemption attached - but this message is lost in transmission, and the wine is left undrunk by the one friend who disbelieves its power to limit memory to an inexact figure, or to eliminate it altogether as the waters of Lethe are known to have done - he doesn't drink the wine, but the other friend, who is personable and handsome by nature and given to indulge in liquor, conviviality, & other men's freshly picked wives, does drink it, and believes enough in its power that he forgets the joys and miseries of his life that night that he drinks the wine to its dregs and goes off to become a hermit on an island in which he is led to believe that he had all his life loved dogwood blossoms, forgetting that in fact it had been a woman's name which he had left behind in a broken trail, in a place where indeed no dogwood or cornel had ever blossomed...
But one man doesn't drink, he tries to forget the branded face of the Beloved that keeps him cynical at daylight and brooding at sunset - that causes him to overlook the desert vistas in which he has lived for centuries and to neglect wonder at what lies over the rolling dunes, on the other side - he never thinks once of what lies on the other side, if whether the ocean sleeps on its back or the one heaven in paralysis -
Perhaps the wine doesn't promise anything, doesn't do anything other than make a man drunk - but it remains that one man chooses to forget - and the other chooses to remember.
Why does the poet remember his beloved, whose memory causes him so much pain, whose preservation like a rack extends his proud volition to brutal and tormenting immobility? It is because the poet bristles inwardly that time could, rather audaciously, measure and terminate his love, a love to which the poet has given birth like a child crying from the womb of sleep and warmth, to which he has made an altar that bears the scrutiny of his defiant authenticity, proof of the one sincerity that causes him to scar his innards with corrosive juices, with the liquor of depths. It is that the poet cannot endure the sight of time scattering what with such delicate grammar and syntax the poet had assembled in a perfect and enduring order - it is that the poet cannot bear to stand by while the wind tears down the castle that had taken years of his life to construct - what had taken his entire strength to make, only to watch blown with cruel vulgarity the face of his beloved with the passing of the sands of time...
She who strives to forget remembers more agonistically - she is aware of this and she dies of it, as if by suicide.
He who tried to remember, had actually forgotten - he retires to the insignificance of a pretty soldier's face whose face calls to mind a young girl's. He drinks with him and takes the soldier's youthful hairless face into his hands and he speaks to him as if he knew that within the soldier a vibrant and fiery and glamorous woman lay beneath. To the winedrinker all women are essentially men, all men essentially women. Knowing one girl he knew all women, & so forth...
When the two friends split and part, a woman who waits by the side of a seacoast suddenly dies, and the friends realize in each other's absence that something had passed away, along with the seasons that meaninglessly drift apart at wider intervals -
The winters are no longer bitter or hardfought - they turn merely cold; the summers turn merely hot; the spring holds up a batch of wordless birdcalls; the autumn like a tiresome guest will divert for an hour and depart, leaving one in wonder at one's own stupendous vulnerability.
When there is nothing to remember there holds forth a sunless horizon, a listless wave.
"The root of man's problems is his memory."
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