Summer is good for memory, perhaps because we have a time free of activity and content that favors mental wanderings. But memory isn't just a cerebral activity, just as any activity that arises from consciousness isn't. He did Descartes a disservice by condemning us to the radical division of dualism. Memory anchors itself in the body, in touch and the senses, and then, if we're capable, it becomes word. There's a specific breeze, a wind whose name I don't know, that takes me back to summer afternoons when the women in my family would break the silence imposed by the long siesta with a clatter of glasses and teapots. Then they would spread a raffia rug in the courtyard, and there, in that corner formed by the jammed adobe walls, that wind would blow. It's been years since I've been back to the patio of my grandparents' old house, and so it's a comfort that in my summer retreat, much further north and in a world radically different from that of pre-industrial rurality, the occasional wind blows, which I can't name in any of my languages. It's not photographs, stories, documents, or archives that transport me back to that time, but a physical sensation. I don't know if it's really my Proustian madeleine or if I've invented it and believed it to alleviate the longing.
Memory, thoughts, writing itself—we place them in our heads or even outside our bodies, in some virtual space called "consciousness," "mind." As if we could exist without flesh and blood and all the biological contingencies that characterize our materiality. And so I pretend I'm writing all this to you outside of my physical form, and I don't tell you that the tramontana isn't blowing right now, and the words I type coexist with the noise of the neighbors' awnings or the distant groan of a rusty panel. Writing frees me from the circumstances of the present, and instead, I feel I can't escape, that the simple exercise of wanting to transfer something readable to the blank page forces me to an honesty with myself that I could overcome in other areas. Perhaps that's why writing is sometimes difficult, just as it's difficult to sit in front of a therapist for the duration of the visit and say whatever we want, without the straitjacket of duties and conventions and with a professional who pays us the full attention that's so scarce now that we have to pay. Perhaps that's why we look forward to vacations, not just to rest, to "disconnect" from work obligations and the rigid routines that organize our days, but to have a time in which, in theory, we can listen to our bodies more, unhurriedly attending to the heartbeats that emerge from them and that we've been stifling for months. It's not an escape, but quite the opposite: a return to a state we assume to be natural, without noise, fumes, rush, or mile-long traffic jams. That's why summer favors good love and good sex, although many couples won't make it to September, according to the statistics. It's not just the higher temperatures, tanned skin, and good wine that increase activity during these "every firefly alive" days. It's the hours we don't have the rest of the year that allow for the emergence of true desire. And mindfulness, the true secret of virtuous lovers. You either produce or you're crazy, we could say, and that's why a society obsessed with money doesn't favor good sex. Nor do the numerous obligations of our advanced way of life, which devalues unproductive and gratuitous pleasures unless they can be monetized somehow. The subversive thing we can do today, an almost revolutionary act, is to enjoy those we love and desire and lose ourselves in them to discover ourselves as freer, more human.
