The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 

            oh
oh                        oh    what     a     year     that        was

An Adrienne Rich quote:

"Nostalgia is amnesia turned around."

The line seems to come from Rich's "Turning the Wheel," included in her A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, Poems 1978-1981.

[TiR noticed the line when it was quoted here.]

This is the same piece in which she writes:

False history gets made all day, any day,
    the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day.

Elsewhere, Rich wrote (in Ms., in 1987's "Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal Life" (later included we believe    herein), as mentioned, for example, here) about becoming someone who embodies the

"choice to become consciously historical -- that is, a person who tries for memory and connectedness against amnesia and nostalgia."

TiR notes here

[for the usual purposes of its own selective, semi-public

[and therefore ludicrous in countless ways necessarily impossible for us to foresee until it's too late]

and half-involuntarily self-caricaturizing

[but pointless]

historical/record-keeping purposes]

    that its notes reflect that we were preoccupied with curiosity about the first quote's possible meanings,     exactly one year ago today.

posted by TiR at 7:03 AM