An Archaeology of Ignorance: Rome II
:to stare at things as if seeing them for the first time: problematic for people who have never admitted to not knowing something even as they first learned of it. Let us blame Italo Calvino, who said a classic is a book that is always being reread. There is only recognition. You’ll know it when you see it. You’ve known it forever by the time you met it, like a pen-pal from the internet.
Platonic cognition is recognition, there was never a beginning / déjà vu is simply wisdom: I have never encountered anything for the first time: I know of things before I know them because I have to / I remember things about people they don’t recall about themselves / they drop these factoids on their way out / scenes I keep on file / if they ever come to collect / choose not to judge you for what your mind chooses to highlight / casual reminders of ex-best-friends’ birthdays / unrequited future souvenirs / found footage on Windows 2007 / precise lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in ten years/
No, I don’t know the first thing, but rest assured I know the second.
Like when they excavate those vases and urns and animal bones / can tell the exact meal that those ancient people had one day or evening, evenings that to those people must have been forgotten. What I had for lunch as archaeological evidence, as everything that’s left of my existence. We cannot handle how incidental we may be: We self-canonize. A classic is a book that is always being reread. I reread myself every day before starting the next page but digging deep is dirty work – still nothing worse than admitting that I, broken and inadequate, don’t know: I don’t know, I don’t know. But I have been here before / before I go
Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian author from São Paulo. Her award-winning novella "All According to Norm" is coming out with Black Spring Press later this year. Meanwhile, you can find plenty of her work online, in litmags such as Cagibi, Pangyrus, and many others.