How difficult, impossible even, it would be to record even one day’s worth of sensations, sights, experiences, recollections and all the other mental ephemera that make up even a single day in life/consciousness. For even if one could note each mental impression – the scent of jasmine, the taste of seawater, the gait of your parent, a pierced earlobe – one could never really convey in words the fullness of meaning (to you) within each, between each, and collectively. The quality of experience is to be found only in recollection and yet that recollection is imperfect. We recreate – both with intent and by instinct – and in that recreation introduce all the flaws of our personality and habits of mind. Our experiences are not really our own until we make them so, and we must report on them to ourselves just as a reporter on the scene takes notes and later compiles a report, embellishes, draws out, artfully, necessarily, a merchantable narrative, to sort and make sense of the congelation of memories of sensory impressions. But is that ‘real’? No, of course not. To create ourselves we must convert the random and the quotidian into a continuum – a personal mythology (or meaning, on a small s spiritual level) and it is this product of conversion that encapsulates what it is to be human, to be me, you, us: the imprint of consciousness.
