Remember

My experience after leaving our little showing of Synecdoche NY was one of the most surreal experiences of my entire life.  There was no specific incident that made my evening more interesting or intriguing than any other.  Accept I couldn’t help but continue to look over my shoulder.  Was someone following me, dictating what I do, and telling me I’m doing it incorrectly, even though it’s who I am?  Is someone whispering directions in my ear that I am not consciously hearing, but am nonetheless carrying out?

I felt apart of everything around me.  While I felt it could all be fake, I couldn’t help but appreciate my surroundings.  Even if they were completely staged by some unknown architect/playwright, they are my reality and all I have ever known.  My life is absolutely real to me, even if somebody else has scripted it.

If my surreal over the shoulder wanderings after Friday were not strange enough, THEN I went to Hastings the next day with my friend and she said she wanted to buy a book.  I immediately recommend Little, Big and they have one copy left.  She picks it up and we walk around a little bit more.  She’s an architecture student and so I thought the house in this book would be particularly interesting to her.  I offered her my copy but she said it sounded so interesting she wanted a copy for herself.

Whilst wandering around the New Age section I RANDOMLY picked up a book called Remember: Be Here Now.  It was a sideways book where the spine was at the top and you flipped the pages up, not to the left.  It was filled with dark brown papyrus and extraordinarily large nonlinear text and illustrations.  The description Amazon gives it is:  Describes one man's transformation upon his acceptance of the principles of Yoga and gives a modern restatement of the importance of the spiritual side of man's nature. Illustrated. What a worthless description…

As I randomly flipped through the pages, I felt I was reading a book about our class.  It never said “nestings” or “alice” or “recursive structure,” but it encompassed EVERYTHING we’ve ever talked about, and everything we could ever talk about:

While I feel this is a PERFECT example, this situation is not unique to this book; I think anything I read from now on will make me feel at least a twinge of what I felt when I randomly picked that book off the shelf.  Will it ever end? Sometimes I hope so, but I my initiation is complete and that my way of thinking has been utterly changed for the rest of my life.  Dammit.