Lake Lacuna

Sometimes they call it “brain fog”, or that the word one forgets is “on the tip of the tongue”. Some envision their brain as a huge repository of files, storing all sorts of information and that, for the moment, they can’t find the file.

I conjure something different.

Like the old game show Let’s Make a Deal, it’s as though the information I want to remember is behind Door Number One, or Number Two, and so on. I know it’s behind Door Number Three. But, then, the door disappears. The stage lights go dim, the audience grows silent. As though the stage and Door Number Three were never there.

Access denied.

Code 404 — not found

So I exit the mental landscape with the missing door, and go wandering elsewhere. Then, sometime later, it’s as though a deep interior failsafe entity, some recovery program nudges my brain and tells me that door number three may have been restored. I quickly return to the mental stage, find the door, open it, and there — finally — is the information I wanted. All of it. Clear, limpid, as though it had never been gone. It was there all along!

But what if one day the nudge doesn’t happen? What if the other doors start to disappear? What if they don’t reappear?

Will I descend into an oubliette?

An oubliette (from French oublier meaning to forget) or bottle dungeon is a basement room which is accessible only from a hatch or hole — an angstloch (German: [ˈaŋstˌlɔx], apparently “fear hole”, but more probably from the Latin angustus “narrow” and German loch “hole”). This was a small hole in the floor of medieval castles and fortresses that led to a cellar or basement room below. The term is German and has no English equivalent, although the door, where there is one, to such a hole is called a trapdoor (German: falltür) in a high ceiling. People were sometimes thrown into an oubliette, occasionally forgotten about or barely kept alive. In that small confined space, there they languished, left on their own, with only fading thoughts — or worse, remaining.

I don’t meditate.

I don’t meditate for a very good reason. Every time, I’ve succeeded in bringing myself down to that interior space which is the goal of most meditative practices, I find myself being mentally lowered through an anstloch into an oubliette. It’s dark, it’s deep, and it seems a foreshadowing of something important ending.

Lacuna. What a sombre, haunting word.

One day I fear that instead of answers behind Door Number Three, there will lie Lake Lacuna. Still, silent, bright and brittle; a lake where the surface shows only tiny frozen ripples, glinting in blinding wintry sunlight. A deep lake, filled with forgotten words, forgotten dreams, forgotten friends, forgotten places, forgotten events, lost stories, lost loves. All encased and unreachable.

Which is part of why I write — before everything drifts and quietly slides under the frozen surface of that silver lake. I write before my memory turns into a moth eaten fabric or a rotten hollowed-out tree stump with a moss colony inside. Or fragments of reminiscences that become like vernal ponds, destined to form briefly and then vanish.

Am I destined to become a revenant of my own mind?