"I remember the long wide hallway lined with rooms. I remember the people in the rooms buying and selling. In this room a woman screamed as she saw her blue hair in the mirror. In this room a boy grabbed a box and hid it in his shirt and walked away with his prize. And I continued down the long wide hallway with great speed. I ran, I flew, I dove on this side and that, as far as I could. And I saw a place of tables and savory smells. And an old man was eating and rice spilled into his beard. And at the end of the long wide hallway was a room full of books and beyond the room full of books was the smell of butter, and they asked me for money or I could not pass, and I had none, and I passed anyway when they weren’t looking. And farther on was a room of chairs, and the room of chairs went dark and nothing was seen there, and new light came, and sounds came, and stories were told of people and places and things true and untrue, past and future, and I remembered my future, and departed from that place that smelled of butter, and there was walking in the cold and dark for a long time, and there was the building, but the sun had not risen and the building could not be entered, and I sat, and I waited.
It’s cold. My head hurts. I hear footsteps. I see a girl dressed all in pink carrying books, wearing a backpack, the pink girl laughs at me into her pink phone. I’m sitting by a door, it’s early, and cold, I stand. I ache, was I sleeping here? I enter the building, it’s warm inside. I stumble towards the smell of coffee; but I don’t have any money. I take a seat nearby, the chair is soft. There are many books here… a bookstore? No…too big, too many students. This place is familiar; I was here before, but how do I know that? By another place, or person, of any thing the image that keeps with my memory? I was preparing for something, reading, writing. Did I have a book? A sense of dread hits me. I’m missing something, something I need. I’ve misplaced something important, but what? How is it that this lives in my mind? What was it? I try to focus again. I think about the past. I know I was here before and I had…whatever it was when I was here. Now I’m here again, but what happened in between, where did it go, where did I go? I retrace my steps. I don’t yet remember what happened but I know I must have traveled to this point somehow. I ask myself, what do I remember? I ask myself where do I remember?"
As we did not meet between writing our chapters and reading them, there was a certain amount of disjointedness, redundancy, and even contradiction. This is to be embraced in the oral tradition. As I heard the others speak I tried to subtly adapt my own telling. This brings me to a topic that I've been thinking about lately. I'm getting interested in active storytelling, with less of an informative focus. Great preparation would be needed and I'm not sure what I would tell, but I will certainly try to approach that subject with my final presentation. One last remark over my sections: there is a reference to the memory caverns in the mall portion and multiple references to The Tempest in the library section.
Overall our theme was of memory being built from physical locations and sensory experiences. The chapter is a little confusing at times as to what is to be learned from specific story examples but it seems to return to the idea that our physical world can act as a map of our stories and our stories can act as maps of the physical world (both directionally and ecologically). Following the mythlines we see that every element of any story is part of countless other stories. Nothing is isolated. The Sacker of Cities brought up a point I'd like to reiterate.
As these early cultures were so constantly dependent on the land, interpreting natural signs (such as which side of the tree the moss grows on) for directions, for input about the state of the region and even as signs of things to come, they were reading the land. Reading predates writing.
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