ABSTRACT
Sometimes we find ourselves in a space that seems familiar but violently unnerves us. That intimately engages us but that alters just at the moment we come to terms with it. The spaces of memory, of dreams, of nightmares, of fairground rides, of children's games: spaces that stop us in our tracks. We shall never collect enough of these spaces because they show us that we are real, that we are our arms and hands and fingers, eyes and tongue, imagination and memory and dreams and muscles. And so we have just discovered that we are in an unfamiliar space that seems familiar, in an explosion of our habitual manners of being. And we invent ways of dealing with these spaces that resemble the games of children – avoidance, conspiracy, confrontation, pleasure seeking, daydreaming. But the space alters, and orientations alter, and the person I am is no longer the person I was before. I began by trying to write eight things I know now that I didn't know before, eight because that is the number of years since my first contact with CPR, and ended recognizing that maybe I did know these things before, they were then not a memory, and of course the only thing absent from an experience or journey itself is the memory of it:
