The proustian bargain.

The future belongs to the logarithms of void.

I will come to know this when the memory pulls back its function. Brash. Metaphysical. Unknowing. Unforgiving. It will start with a morpheme, a fracture of time, a violent osmosis. This is what the world-system offers. A death by excavation. A swinging purge. Soon enough, everything will sink into the lake of neurological information.

What goes first?

The first sound of reason — the scream across my father's living room, the air of joy embedded in every decibel colliding with the barrier. The thrill of the newness of life, the understanding that I am a mobile system of bones and flesh emanating a consciousness, a pang, a signalling, a desire for blooming. All the other sounds shall follow ; creaking of doors, the cracking of eggs for breakfast, the dry coughs of my grandmother, the distant dreadful yawns of automobiles, the dismal whistle of a Monday morning. The buzzing refusal of electrons announcing themselves on the surface of my skin.

Then the bloodied erasure of mistakes —chemically tabula rasa, no more feet of clay or misdeeds, the inconstancy of affection shown towards friends and family. Memory becomes a receding sea —receding into what? Hell, a willing blackness, a balcony of brinks. The world-system giveth that for nothing. Everyone wanted to forget as much as they craved the act of recalling. But something in the world had made our memories too perceptible for our inner processes. Something had seeped into the mass consciousness of mankind, enhancing the images of the mind. Every bombing, every war, every unrest, every assassination, every statistical analysis of a nascent doom rendered the networks of our mind efficient. Efficiency is anguish. Perfect memory is death.

What if we bring to life a new kind of death?

The gap of data. A cavernous space of what was once a complex structure. A world-system branch sits atop a verdant hill in Jos. Like God's house haunted by demons of a futuristic alchemy— a cathedral of morbidity. That was where I had my memories removed. Colloquially the process was called troubleshooting around these parts. Parlance from the computer technicians tasked with maintaining the world-system. Mankind is a computer with a closed architecture system, no modifications were to be made to keep us from forgetting. But said modifications did not apply to my father — we did not address him as father, we called him the general. Habits of an old war. He had no care for forgetting. To him, the vividness was a manna from heaven, a chance to soak in the sounds of the past and the fury of a bygone military. The endearing habits of a dead spouse.

“O I have seen thee in thy sleep, I have watched thee in wanderings. You don't see this as a blessing, my son. Slivers of memory going nowhere but within’’

He had a penchant for the theatrical. The general could have been, in alternate worlds, a master of the arts. Outside our house in Benin, in our verdant compound where we fought about troubleshooting. I remember the resolute smell of vegetation and paint — the deodorant of estate planning. A quietness imposed upon by the impassioned argument about memory and technology. If we fought about anything else we would have to confront that which hangs in the coldness — a grief of griefs. Like most conversations between father and son, it was prudent to talk about the macrocosm. It was better to debate like ligators of belief.

“ The unconscious is sacred”

“You fear I want to forget her”

“ And is that an unreasonable fear?”

“Not as unreasonable as remembering everything. Forgetting is just as sacred”

The past is never dead. It's the only immortal entity. I feel everything slipping into the receptacle of a distant eternity. The troubleshooting is not without flaws. The most imperfect of systems. The process in Jos was agonising despite the promise of a painless excavation. As you can probably tell I am starting to remember as much as I forget. But I cannot definitively separate the yarns weaved by my brain from actual memory. All that I seem to remember must hold the murkiest of waters. A fictive programing of an empty-nest threading event. Even as I write to you now, I write in fragmentary doubts. I'm writing against the precision of reason. I seek refuge in your understanding, however tenuous. But I'm forming new memories by staring at objects and listening to sound that travels through these objects — I'm grateful for the physics of ordinary items and the general order in which the world works. What was it that Proust called the past — never erased but a palimpsest. Everything imposes itself on everything but I cannot trust them. To keep us from truly remembering they burn the texts, they bury memorabilia, they call the newfound eidetic ability an accursed disease.

“What is it you ache to forget? ” the general once asked me.

“I do not know. The anguish of events?”

“ But… this is God's way of making us perfect”

“ You and I have seen humanity on the fringe of its spectrum. God cannot make us perfect”

I write to you now to tell you that the troubleshooting system is failing me. The order of forgetting is naturally reverse-engineering. I can remember you. I write to you to tell you that I can remember the corporeality of you. Maybe I write from a callow place, a ceaseless efflux of trembling. I am afraid that when you write back you'll tell tales of my indelible flaws and anecdotes about the bridges I set ablaze. Is it a curse that I cannot recall my mistakes or the severity of them?

Forgive me. My heart is in a coffin with all flattened memories, beating against the current of a flooded memory palace. I am trying to remember you. I remember you. I remember the construct of you. Does that count as truth?