THE EERIE conundrum of how it is possible to conceal something from ourselves, how a single entity can be simultaneously the one who is hiding something and the one from whom the thing is hidden. This can only happen because the unity and transparency which we ordinarily ascribe to our minds are illusory. Gaps and inconsistencies are constitutive of what we are. What covers over these lacunae are stories — which therefore possess their own agency. Memory is already a story, and when there are gaps in memory, new stories must be confabulated to fill in the holes. But who is the author of these stories? The answer is that there is not so much an author as a confabulatory process without any “one” behind it […] this functioning is usually obscured, and only comes into view when something goes wrong — when the stories fail, and the question about the machinery that produces them becomes unavoidable.

and

Failure to see, the involuntary process of overlooking material which contradicts — or simply does not fit in with — the dominant stories which we tell ourselves is part of the ongoing 'editing process” through which what we experience as identity is produced [...] The unconscious, something which is itself a gap, an invisibility, is also the producer of gaps which are not seen.

we are all eerie things, fisher says, inherently and immutably, with or without the shadow of capital. we are all--whether we perceive it or not--exemplars of the strange, the grotesque, the alien and the inexplicable--it is in the very nature of our memory, of what is actually happening when we say we remember. it is this--the reminder of our common eerieness, our common amnesia--which makes me feel, briefly, human again. for some number of years i have felt reduced to a shadow, because where my memory once lived only faint impressions of light now remain. this conclusion seems merrily verified by the outside world, by late-night armchair philosophizing in which people say, if i ever get alzheimer's or dementia, just kill me, i'd rather die--by movies like nolan's memento or books like priest's the affirmation, above referenced ("I existed so long as I remembered"), by the speed at which pity in the face of disease--an anachronistic disease, i admit, a strange look on someone who has barely touched their mid-twenties--becomes frustration and then real anger. reading these passages of fisher, however, i was consumed by a wave of relief: if we are all constituted by gaps, by inconsistencies, by omissions--if all our memories are in the end pastiche and myth and confabulation--then i am not lesser for having gaps that are larger than others. it is only that the machinery has come to light, that the eerie has risen to the surface.

banal personal connection aside, i felt about the weird and the eerie what i feel about all fisher's writings: impressed, in every sense of the term, by his powers of illumination. the indiscriminate breadth of his analysis, that hollywood blockbuster and endangered british post-punk alike can be fashioned into a lamplight, a way to compass the effects of the thing called capital. beyond the object, he asks us to look at its shadow.

of course, each moment of awe (stopped on the train to work by a beautiful turn of phrase, forgetting my place in the checkout line to highlight another passage) is accompanied by a certain wistfulness--the kind of sadness you can only feel for strangers. mark fisher had an intense, irreplicable mind, and he left us very early. i will wonder, always, what he'd make of today.