no event seems to have been involved
by uzwi
Unpredictable flashbacks, so brief they vanish as they arrive. Hard to grasp, impossible to trace. Prompted by the weather, the light, a sound, a thought about something else entirely, or—finally, and worst—without any stimulus at all: leakage from someone else’s project, as if someone unrelated down there is editing footage of your life for purposes of their own. Fields, hills, foreign cities. Sometimes a voice. Always objects in light. A figure or two, not many, glimpsed from across a room or a street. You can’t call these memories. They don’t last long enough. No event seems to be involved, or even implied. They don’t seem to have happened to you, only to have been recorded. Meanwhile in the garden the rose, thuggish and unpruned, is pulling the rose arch apart.
the m john harrison blog 
The heart of the rose is always another flower.
This sounded uncannily familiar, then I realized it strongly reminds me in its structure of “Rockets of the Western Suburbs.” Different content (largely “internal” vs. external, though there are echoes of RotWS in “someone down there” — the high-angle p.o.v. — or in “editing footage” relating to the camera cut in the earlier piece), but similar rhythms, even a similar modulation, I guess you might call it, about 3/4 of the way through, something like the turn of a sonnet… It’s almost like a pendant to it.
‘Unpredictable flashbacks, so brief they vanish as they arrive.’
I too have had this experience. A micro-second of past life re-lived.
Hi Robert: I was thinking too brief for that. Single images, if you like. Mostly like photographs, but snatched away in the same moment they’re presented. Hardly registering on your real-time present. Too short a time to remember anything, or relive anything through. Fascinates me that I don’t know what’s being *said*. Absolutely non-narrative, which is such a relief when you live in a world where everything is storified, grouped, angled, shaped, made into something.
To have an experience that hasn’t been gripped, organised & given purpose by story, & can’t therefore be placed in a category by TV Tropes! How restful.