events and memories

I went to the career counselor yesterday...
... and I'd rather talk about something else right now. To sum up: I don't think I learned anything I didn't already know except that my institution of some sort of learning has a database of companies to play with. Also that there's a "career library" which I'm going to raid tomorrow. Books along the lines of "what do I do with my BA in English," to borrow a line from Avenue Q.

Anyway. I could write more about it, but there's no point and my brain is being eaten alive by Baudrillard, which I'd much rather talk about.

This scenario occurred in two parts:
1) I decided that, for writing purposes, it would be an intelligent idea to have a little mini notebook with me to scribble ideas down.
2) I spent my lunchtime before the career counseling appointment reading Baudrillard, flipping through the The Illusion of the End after having taught an excerpt of it recently.

The essential thing here is that I tripped over a few lines that made me pause, ponder, rip out the notebook, scribble illegibly for a while, relate everything back to the novel-in-progress (the general setting and characters of which have formed the backbone of most of my daydreams for months now - i.e., how would MC deal with these thoughts? what about main romantic interest? friends? etc.), and then just mulled everything over in my brain for a while. At this point it's probably far too late, and I too tired, to get through everything I'm thinking; I may very well revisit this all later. However, I thought I'd get the quotes out there anyway. These are from Jean Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End, trans. Christopher Butler (Stanford UP) 1994.

"If there is something distinctive about an event - about what constitutes an event and thus has historical value - it is the fact that it is irreversible, that there is always something in it which exceeds meaning and interpretation." (13)

Baudrillard here is talking about events in the sense of global history (in the midst of a discussion wherein he asserts that we've lost history altogether). I find the quote to have tremendous meaning on an individual level, however, and have been dealing with it on that plane. I suppose that when it comes to memories, there are narratives and then there are events. Narratives would be the bits and pieces that are understood, readily placed within a larger overall arc of our lives, bits and pieces that accumulate like so much flotsam but which can be generally comprehended as continuous or flowing in some sort of storyline. Events, then, would rare, and probably often (I'd like to think not always) traumatic: those moments that defy interpretation, that can't be fit into an overall life narrative, that are just too BIG. I haven't figured out exactly what I think would qualify as an event in a person's life - I suppose that would be left to the individual (though I may have more thoughts when I'm more conscious).

"We have reached the point of seeking in water a memory without traces, of hoping... that something still remains when even molecular traces have disappeared." (31)

I'm not entirely sure why I latched onto this so strongly. Molecules in the body entirely replaced every seven years, so that on a molecular level we are entirely renewed, replaced, changed. I'm struck by the idea that I'm filled with memories of which my body has no molecular memory, that people who touched me, situations that affected me and that still live with me in my mind are, to the molecules of my body, utterly foreign. Seven years and the molecular traces vanish.

The seven year molecular replacement is an interesting way to conceive of time, to mark the distance from an event. If most memories are bits of narrative which flow through our minds, would the impact of an event be worn down over time as tiny, insignificant pieces shifted themselves bit by bit outside of our consciousness, or would an event stay true despite that shifting? Would an event be the one memory that time couldn't affect, that no amount of living could erase?