I’ve just cleaned out my computer’s memory and tossed out old and unused programs. Damn, I wish it were that easy for humans. They say that you can never really erase computer programs, however. There is always some vestigial memory of the past, some bits and bytes simply will not go quietly into the abyss of the forgotten. Memory seems so fragile and so precious. When all is said and done all that we have and are is memory.
I was in the hot-tub about a week ago with MM. Sitting naked in the water is both a moment of cleansing and of birth. Looking into the stars I was aware that the light that I saw was ancient. It was a record of the past brought into the present. MM was in a pensive mood, too. She is the last survivor of her family’s past. Her brothers and parents have all died. All of their experience, all of their memories died with them, she observed.
I am dubious of that is so many ways. Perhaps it is that faith is the ultimate act of denial. I tend to believe that there is a great collective mind in which all experience is joined together in a sort of cosmic tapestry of human experience. No, more than human experience: life experience would be closer to the mark. All of those stars that I saw. Some must have life and that life has to have some experience and some sort of memory. I refuse to believe that it all falls into silence.
I cling to the past in order to imagine the future.
I have no desire to reduplicate the past. Hell, I have so few memories of the past that I wonder if I had been in some sort of altered state before now. My past is shadowy; my memories are dreams whose metaphors resist easy explication. I have dreams… more often I have nightmares. I arise in the hope that today will be better. Boats beating against the tide? The tide changes. It sweeps out the past as it continues to pulsate in the rhythms of a life that seems to us eternal but may be most ephemeral. There are so many memories: the first time I made love, being beaten by my father, the first words that my daughters spoke, the pain I felt when both marriages died, music. Ah, music.
Memories are both sensual and intellectual. We recall facts but relive the sensations of the past. Several posts ago I spoke of age-regression, the subconscious reliving of memories. I know that I have relived memories that are terrible and still remain in the shadows of anonymous masks that conceal in order to reveal. You know, the sense of déjà vu that occurs when you hear a song, smell a scent, see a sign: all of that is the reality of memory transforming the moment into a experience past. There is something almost sacramental about that. The center of eucharistic theology is the anamnesis or the memory of the meal. Ritual memory involves all the senses and seeks to age regress to a moment when the covenant was cut and the future transformed by a kairos, a moment that breaks out of the stream of time that it may harmonize with eternity. Now, but not yet… a sort of prolepsis that occurs in memory. Looking forward by looking back.
My computer will hopefully run better now that the hard-drive is cleared out. It loses memories in order to function. That may be why human minds don’t function that way. I am the sum of my experience. I pass on my experience to others and all are changed. None of us stays the same as we move through the stream of time and generate new experience that sings in harmony with the old. We live to remember and in death we forget ourselves. Gone, but not forgotten in a mind greater than the sum of all life experience?
Ah, but I am just a fool…
