Still Developing

keta /KAY-tah/ 
n. an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.

"It's not just the moments that we remember. Not the grand gestures and catered ceremonies. Not the world we capture poised and smiling in photos. It's the invisible things, the minutes. The cheap raw material of ordinary time. These are the images that will linger in your mind, moving back and forth, still developing."

Keta | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from John Koenig on Vimeo.

So Much More than You Really Know

Jennifer Michael Hecht in conversation with Krista Tippett, "Hope for Our Future Selves," On Being, March 27, 2014:

It’s an extreme reaction, but lots of people die after a suicide. They come in groups...

But don’t ever forget the flipside, which is your staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone is aware of at this moment. We’re in it together in this profound way, and you can take some strength from that. For me, that’s been very important...My two arguments that you owe it to other people and that you owe it to your future self, are both about looking at what the individual means. 

Because when you look at a person within a group, and all the trends we follow: the clothes, the car, the not-car —all these trends that we follow, you realize the extent to which we’re enmeshed. And when you look at yourself and realize that you have fallen in and out of love with the same person, you have fought with friends, thinking you’ll never speak to them again, and you love them again...

We have different moods that profoundly change our outlook, and it’s not right to let your worst one murder all the others.

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See also: Hecht, J. M. (2013). Stay: A history of suicide and the philosophies against it. New Haven: Yale University Press

It Doesn't Get Better

For most kids in high school, the future promises better days. But for a certain group, there's no time like the past.

"If you're developing a persona more than an actual personality, if the whole high school world revolves around you even though you lack basic human empathy, it doesn't get better." 

Nothing Beside Remains

Ozymandia
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

[annotated]

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Fiction Rules Our Lives

Mark Slouka discussing "Brewster" on KCRW's Bookworm, September 12, 2013: 

I think that fiction does contain certain kinds of truth that are apart—maybe beyond what we've actually lived. I actually think that anything that has slipped into the past—any moment that has actually passed -- has entered the domain of fiction.

If you tell me what you did this morning, you know, after breakfast, it will creat a kind of a fiction. You'll leave certain things out, you'll stress other things you didn't think were more interesting. So I think fiction sort of rules our lives on every level.

For me, it's a matter of looking at how storytelling—fiction—sort of bleeds into our reality all the time. I mean, that's kind of where I live as a writer.  

Slouka, M. (2013). Brewster: A novel. [Amazon, library]