The Myth of Memory

I have been thinking about memory today. I read somewhere that memories deteriorate and that they become intertwined with the subconscious desires that surrounded the objective incident recalled. When asked to recount an event that occurred years ago, it is probable that what will be told, unless ritualized or formalized, will include much of what I felt or wished would have happened rather than what did occur. Memories are subjective at best. The objective reality only exists as an external absolute that is experienced and then colored by the sum and total of our experience. Thus, memories serve best as the sum of our fears, desires, hopes, and dreams rather than the repository of the objective. Indeed, as history is incomplete, so too is memory a warped mirror that refracts as well as reflecting the experience of the past.

I think this is why it is important to have a collection of memories, the sum of various peoples' experience of an event that can tell the story in a less subjective manner by parsing out what is common to all accounts. But still, that is only the fact of the thing. It does not account for the emotive content of an experience.

Consider 9/11. That is burnt into American consciousness. The facts are really not the experience. What makes the thing vital to our self-understanding as a nation is the emotional impact that it had on our nation. It has become, in short order, part of the popular mythology and a high-feast day in the American Civil Religion. What really happened? Nobody knows. Planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Lives were lost. But what of the events in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC? They have fallen into the periphery of the national memory. NY/NY and the symbol of the towers having fallen into rubble is what remains in seared into our consciousness. This is neither good nor bad; it bespeaks a process of myth-making that limits and makes into a metaphor the objective events that in and of themselves become less important than the myth.

It is more than the deterioration and conflation of fact with fantasy that this represents: it is to say that the objective reality can only be guessed at. We live in a moment, but experience the life we lead ex post facto. It takes nanoseconds for our minds to process information. In that time the split-second that separates us from processing what we have only momentarily before experienced serves as a chasm between the objective and subjective. Furthermore, we perceive through the limited scope of our senses.

I have never accepted the idea of a solipsism. But what I am writing is close to that idea: all reality exists only in each individual's mind. All that is is because I perceive it to be. Without my perception nothing that is can be known and thus cannot be, as being implies relation beyond the self.

Looking at the previous paragraph I find more than a small amount of discomfort. I am a Platonist that believes in a common divine mind from which all things emanate. All experience is part of a communal memory that is deep within us. That stands in start contradiction to what I wrote before. The objective reality is known only through subjective experience. The absolute mind can only be supposed by the experience of individual minds that exist as finite expressions of something that is finally ineffable.

I have to think about this a bit more, I feel.

Rainy Days

I like the rain. There is something of a pagan in me that sees a beauty in the sexual imagery of rain: the sky god makes love to the earth mother and we, their children, are born of that ecstatic union of the cosmos. Maybe it is the image of an orgasm as the fountain (a word chosen deliberately) of creation that appeals to me. Sex is such a powerful thing. There is something sacred about it. Two people come together (no pun intended there) and unite as one. If it is good sex, there are moments when the partners are so closely united as to be what the Jewish tradition calls "one flesh." There is something of a dualism there, as well. We are ecstatic in sexual union. The word ecstasy comes from two Greek words, εκ + ιστεμι, meaning to stand outside of one's self, or - more colloquially - to be beside one's self. The word, in Greek, had the meaning of having taken leave of one's senses, a sort of divine madness.

Is it any wonder, given the power of this union, that we call it making love?

May your life be full of such joy and divine madness.

ל׳חים