An update on the cucumber
from here to memory
Like some desiccated, vegetal Ozymandias, a shattered visage is all that remains. What was once an eccentric event from a mysterious and unknown mandolin slicer is now a faded daguerreotype. Whatever moisture remained in the original is now a papery, flaky remnant. A certain dryness has set in that can only be the harbinger of its eventual and certain vanishing, but even now this brittle exoskeleton stands as a rebellious testimony of a cucumbery life that well exceeded any normal bounds.
It is now more than five months since my original post on the cucumber. When even our fragile viscosity has passed, what does it mean? When the “sneer of cold command” has absquatulated into desuetude, and all that remains is the stretched out sands, how do we come to terms with the vestiges of our wonder at the oddities of cucumbers sticking to windows?
All of which is to say, it will soon only live within my memory, and its significance will be present for me in a way in which it will not be to others. However “cool as a” it was in its corporeal existence, its relative temperature under pressure will now only exist in my memory.
I can look on this motion from reality to memory as the tragedy of existence, but it’s not the only way to tell the story. Anitya might be a perfect way to describe my cucumber in the sublunar realm, but, sub specie aeternitas, I like to think that its eternal presence and presentness in my memory can be a foretaste of some other form of existence where nothing is ever lost.
“These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or other’s credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. “I will do this or that,” say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, “and this or that will follow.” “O that this or that might be!” “God avert this or that!” So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images wanting.” - St. Augustine’s Confessions