June 20, 2002

  • "There is another experience worth mentioning: jamais vu.  It's the opposite of deja vu.  Instead of feeling extra familiar, things seem totally unfamiliar.  In this case there is too little connection between long-term memory and perceptions from the present.  When a person is in this state, nothing they experience seems to have anything to do with the past.  They might be talking to a person they know well and suddenly they person seems totally unfamiliar.  Their sense of knowing the person, and knowing how to relate to them simply vanishes.  A room in which they spend a lot of time suddenly becomes totally novel; everything seems new.  Details they will have seen a thousand times suddenly become engaging."


    --from "Deja Vu in Spiritual and Scientific Views," Todd Murphy


    And I believe there is yet another related experience in the vu family:  presque vu.  It’s the feeling that things are almost  but not quite familiar.  As if each breathless moment is one of trying on Cinderella’s slipper—while not quite  being Cinderella.  As if things would be entirely familiar if only one more miniscule detail would fall into place.  Like feeling one’s hair lift into a static clench while standing on an open field under an ominous thundercloud and sensing the lightning ladder latticing, building, ready to usher in the moment...when?...of fulfillment.  No it hasn't happened before, or yet, yet feels so pregnant...


    Ah, presque vu, do I know you?  I seethe with thoughts-but are they mine? An encompassing madness seems to fill me with a clash of voices strange to me.  I often ponder: could this transient deluge be the disembodied degraded spewings of recent corpses’ rotting brains?  A collective psychic dribble not yet expunged from the biosphere but in the process of fleeting thither, without fixed reference, and of no patent use to life?  As this psychic wave of a world-passing washes over me, I wonder can I ride the surf?

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