ALL OF US HAVE A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION called consciousness. Part of our subjective life, of course, is our memories, a subject which for me appears to be a kind of fetish. Maybe it is something that just is a part of old age, as our memories quite naturally proliferate like so many subterranean potatoes as we get on in years. Charles Baudelaire told us in his ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ of this quite common phenomenon: “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.” You may be the producer of these memories, but you also need to fill the role of director. There is no script; there are no guideposts; no programming cues pop up along the way. It can be an ever-revolving, clumsily pieced together film of your past. You have to concentrate to act as director, otherwise you are at the mercy of a rather inattentive, unsalaried doofus flipping through pages that he has gathered loosely together after dropping them behind your back. If you desire chronology, you’re out of luck. It’s piecemeal and helter-skelter. Good luck keeping track. You open at the Bijou next Friday.
The older I get, the more I realize how unreliable memories are. Two people can have experienced the same event, together at the same time, and yet years later, you will find their 'scripts' are quite different. What really happened? Without a time machine, no one will ever know for sure. We also tend to remember unpleasant events with a bit of a filter on them, which allows us to repeat the actions that caused the unpleasant experience over and over. On the other hand, pleasant memories tend to be elevated to a pedestal that they perhaps don't really deserve. Maybe that's why it's so easy to allow ourselves to live in the past.
Terry
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Terry,
When you talked about how we can filter some unpleasant memories so we forget and can repeat past mistakes... my mind jumped immediately to childbirth. Why any woman would want to experience that pain once, let alone multiple times, doesn't make sense. I remember complete joy after finding out I was having a second baby, even though there were so many reasons for me to be filled with fear and dread. I gave her the middle name Joy, and of course she's the kid that won't smile in pictures.
Funny you should mention childbirth, because that was on my mind when I wrote the post!