remembering
i did learn a little bit
when i remembered
and on that night
i (re)recalled a childhood memory recently
one that i am not sure is completely accurate
and may be a part of my own self-made mythology
though i am not sure to what end i would have created it
it never had occurred to me to consider the size of this memory
the way it sticks out as an experience in an otherwise murky set of memories
the fact of even having this memory pointing to something else, something more
i had told the story many times before and thought it just a funny thing about myself as a child. but now thinking about it- it seems like a somewhat less innocuous story. one that points to how i may have been reacting to what was going on around me.
the memory itself surrounding a brown glass treasure chest bank
i held on to it for years i wonder where it went
the women who gave it to me
the context of meeting them
the reason why i was there
the way this fits into my life
what my life was
what it is
.
I read this while studying the different kinds of words the Greek languages uses to describe states of emotional being, specifically excesses in emotions. For example, for anger there are four distinct words I’ve found which are best translated as distinct states — passionate, hasty, sulky and morose. These all fall under ill-directed anger, since in classical Greek there are also forms of justified anger considered necessary and virtuous. No time to put the Greek characters, sorry. Aristotle says, “it is human to avenge oneself and to resent certain things is slavish and a moral defect, hence we must have a certain amount of anger. The amount must be duly regulated, but where the true mean is cannot be laid down in the abstract; it depends on the particular circumstances, and must be left to the intuitive judgment of the mind…..different forms of evil [as well as emotions] are mutually destructive, and that it is only by tempering evil with a certain admixture of good that its existence can be borne.”
It is interesting to read about an extinct society and see the past resonating so heavily into the present day. My plain and rhetorical thought of the a.m.