i keep turning up index cards onto which i'd jotted down miscellaneous bits of useful information and thoughts when i was studying for the exams."delilah = accomplished snare (samson agon)" one said. another one said: "be fruitful and multiply = renaissance exhortion = use of manure? rikita!" a third: biographia lit 14: coleridge + wordsworth = division of labour." they are of absolutely no use to me or anyone else, i just thought, at the time, they might jig the memory and perhaps if remembered during the exam could be tossed out to sound learnedly off-the-cuff. there's the cryptic "spenser's hymn to heavenly love: eroticised cosmology. cosmos = intrinsically ornamental." to clear attempts at organising and linking texts across fields by theme: "horatian ode + easter 1916 connected to parnell episode in joyce + portrayal of ireland in spenser." they're scattered all over the room; i sometimes find them under the bed, or behind the heater, or under piles of books. they range from the querying ""virtude" in camoes = "virtute" in dante? use in moby dick?" "trolls in pratchett vs marshall mcluhan on rear view mirrors: nohrnberg? "croxton play = testing of the sign. but: disintegration or reinforcement?" to the matter-of-fact: "gray didn't use the heroic couplet. ballad." "first astrophil and stella sonnet - hexameter. songs interspersed = 11."

perhaps i should keep them for trivia? five years ago i'm sure i'd have thrown them out - you can always have new ideas, reread texts. nowadays though, even those of us between the angels and the dragonflies must be creatures of time. or is it a question of memory - for if we do not hoard our index cards against the increasing lacunae in thought, the futile fumbling for lost keys to ideas put away in some mind-chamber, the lapses in recollection.

at this point what comes to mind are the macneice lines, "more and more often i find your burgling fingers ready to pick the locks where mine were too unsteady." only in wanting to use it to describe a phenomenon i also run up against the very same inexactitude of memory i am trying to describe: i do not remember the line breaks, and cannot even quote the lines with certainty.

and now again i wonder - are they meant to be card catalog and memory triggers, or simply relics of my misspent youth?