Echthesia

a vocab word that’s time out of mind…

Appropriately titled ‘The Persistence of Memory.’ Salvador Dali. But you knew that.

I got this word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows again (by John Koenig). That little, exquisite, maddening book… I have it by the commode in the bathroom, and that’s not an insulting thing: what it is, is a particular rhythm of reading. It’s the scrying technique I’ve written about before: flipping the magical tome open to a random page and extracting meaning from what you find. That’s how I found this word, and it struck me as quite a relevant word for at least my world right now.

Echthesia is from p.182-183:

’a state of confusion when your own internal sense of time doesn’t seem to match that of the calendar—knowing that something just happened though it apparently took place seven years ago or that you somehow built up a decade of memories in the span of only a year and a half.’

~

We* always talk about how the week between Xmas and New Years is a liminal, time-free state filled with too much cheese, chocolate, and wine. It’s a running joke across the socials, and a way to wryly communicate and commiserate with the discombobulating feeling most of us are going through during that time.

*By ‘we,’ I mean everyone. Or maybe I really mean the royal ‘we,’ I dunno.

In my recent between-times holiday world, for example: I was sick for almost 2 weeks with the latest global crud, then had a Xmas jaunt for a week up the mountain at my in-laws’, then a week in between (is that right?) and then my other in-laws came out to visit for a week, and then my partner was away on a business trip for a portion of this week, and… is it February yet?

That sounds clear enough, right? But in my memory, it’s way muddier than that. Like: did I get sick after Xmas, or before? How long was it really between both in-laws’ visits? Is it 2025? And then I had a show somewhere in there too; one I performed in as well as produced. There was certainly some form of overlap between my illness and the trip up the mountains, but I can’t precisely remember.

But that was the holidays, which is supposed to be all about losing track of time, having several days off, and etc. I get bouts of echthesia periodically and frequently, not just during the holidays. This might be a thing that happens as you get older, maybe? A young adulthood of heavy drinking? Latent lockdown brain fog? Perimenopause? Some viscous mix of all of those?

Writing memoir is a challenge of echthesia, I’ve found: trying to parse out when this happened versus that, and when the overlaps happen. Like, I measure high school years by what musical we did but if I have to name a year by number, I often just bluescreen. I know certain dates because I’m supposed to: class of ‘91, college grad ‘95, first marriage ‘99, and then… once grad school hits, it all goes wibbly-wobbly. My own echthesia is strongest when trying to remember my adult years. For example, the actual date of my divorce is so far removed from the actual year that we agreed to divorce, and my moving into my own place is somehow separated out from both of those in my brain. That would be 2015, 2019, and 2017 respectively though that feels way way more recent than it could possibly be. Then again, right now even 2019 isn’t actually that recent, in reality. Which I also can’t wrap my brain around.

‘How long have you two been together?’ people ask me and my partner. ‘7 years. Or 35, depending on when you want to start the clock,’ we often reply. We first met in high school science class (or Romeo & Juliet rehearsal, depending on which one of us you ask), but didn’t date until decades later when we re-unioned in our 40s. That’s a serious wibbly-wobbly sensation, there: often, I’ll look over at him sitting at his work station at the dining room table, and suddenly I’ll see his teenage self superimposed over him, like an old double exposure on film. So long ago melding with right now. Which is a kind of truth, if you think about it. And now that we’re getting married, time seems to be fast forwarding instead of crawling. Oh, and his proposal was one of those many events that blend together in my brain from these recent past holidays—on Xmas Eve, in fact. And how do I insert that into the swirling morass of holiday echthesia?

There was an art project we used to do in elementary school, a technique that would result in abstract swirls of various colors frozen in time on paper. How it worked was, you made a mix of various oils and paints, I think? I don’t remember exactly what the substances were, but you’d slosh them into a tub, then dip the paper into the tub, sliding it through the stuff, and then would lift it out, watching the stuff drip off in interesting patterns, and clip it up to dry. Then you could draw things over the swirly background, or just enjoy it as is. That’s what I think the feeling of echthesia looks like. Swirling beauty that creates patterns you can add meaning to or not, that overlap and make an aesthetically pleasing whole.