Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life: Personal Perspectives (Section IVa)

Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life:
The Gift and Curse of Mnemosyne and Lethe

Section IV – Personal Perspectives (a) -

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale

So, here I am thinking of Thoreau’s answer to the questions posed in his own chapter title and serving as catalyst for his own inquiry from his book Walden “Where I lived and what I lived for” and his words still speak, even to this day -

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish into the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one.

 - Mr. HDT. Mr. Cipher. The American Sphinx.

Okay, so that got me to thinking about this: Our lives as palimpsest or tabula rasa? Or as one big wall of graffiti. Our lives as amor fati? So that, a la Nietzsche, you would want to do it all over again, your life, as in over and over and over again. But still the same? In perpetuity? Or be given a fresh start yet again? A new beginning? Sort of like most of our cells in our body at least according to Hayflick who said that, “Most of your cells do not accompany you from the cradle to the grave, so you are really are not the same person that you were even a few years ago, either figuratively or literally.”  Think about that! When you celebrate your birthday, you are really celebrating only those cells that have not been replaced yet, but the rest of you, how old is that? Well, what parts are you talking about? What parts have been replaced and what parts do you still have from the beginning? Sort of like the identity and change paradox known as Ship of Theseus. Anyway, back to our supposed amor fati. Yes, there is one life and there is also one big catch according to Nietzsche, that is if you buy into his metaphysical perspective.

And it is that you cannot carry over the knowledge, the lessons, the experiences or the wisdom from the past and so the probabilities that emerged and representing your fate is therefore sealed in a Sisyphean loop all without the wisdom of the past and so your future is still determined. Or is it? And what would it matter? I’m right back to the same spot because it all appears to be smoky metaphysics and sticky cow manure. This is this. One shot. This is the fate that we know and the only have. So carpe diem. No more than that, carpe momento! This second, this moment. And in this moment, I reflect back to another time in my life and so many years ago.

As we carry on our business of life, the deep and significant can become lost and postponed so that as our parents, our relatives, our friends die and are no more, we wish that there would have been more time, time for such a word, to have said something meaningful, but alas we are but brief candles after all, and the epiphany shocks us because the petty pace has all crept up on us, day after day it all marches on relentlessly, on our way to a dusty death. In the long run and when put into perspective it has all flashed before us as we think about our one hour upon the stage, and then gone. Perhaps the nuances and the snippets will be gathered up by a novelist – a storyteller – a blogger – and then the script embellished and interspersed with theatrics, full of whopper tales and suspect events, and in the end all of it representing not too much in the grand scale of things.

We realize it was a walking shadow. Was that me that appeared before me in the mirror? And was that me as the I that established so many relationships over time? Who was I to me and to others? What role upon the stage? Did I change? Did I stay the same? And who would record, down to the last syllable, all of this rumination and reminiscence? Hey, we have met the storytellers and they are us.

And so here I am and the months are quickly moving onward. Here it is already into late December and it has been non-stop action on building this blog site and creating numerous HTML documents that are beginning to link and cross-link even though the buttons to move forward and backward through links seem to be a linear process. In other words my linking back and forth moves in geometric lines of related information but yet the subjective feel is all right-brained and contextual and fluid and following infinite possibilities on an ever branching tree. No wonder they use words like explorer and safari to describe the investigative and connective functions of the WWW. It is easy to move through the information – but like Theseus, one needs a thread to find your way out of the labyrinth. In a way, it’s the same process that reminds me of the simple act of going back and establishing a reference point through one’s memories, jumping from various events, sometimes in a random and spontaneous fashion. How to place order on all of it?

In a way, I think of my life as both the chambered nautilus and a large sheet of fabric made of various threads now woven to reveal some patterns, but I suppose the overall material is still being created, but slower and more methodical. The river that was once flowing rapidly is now beyond the mid-way point, and the source of it all – the ocean – seems to be more influential now than the small streams that began the flow many years ago. I remember thinking just a couple of months back how it was going to be strange, a strange trip or surreal party to be involved in creating one’s own narrative of life and that strangeness is no different than let’s say the great question of Leibniz and Heidegger based on the notion that nothing is simpler than nothing, thus -“Why is there something rather than nothing” which makes me think of how one gets started from nothing? Or so it seems when answering the question of where one begins with writing. There is always something to our lives worth recalling but trying to get that something to start it all off is the challenge whatever that original point may be with me or someone else. It is as difficult trying to explain the fact that we are here and we are something and not nothing. But why? How would you go about explaining your presence as it is today? How did you come to be? One must start somewhere at some time along the ontological continuum. So I want to start here where the memories are seen quite clearly, yet emergent, coming out of the gray or some cave or some labyrinth. Well, get going. Write! Create the text and begin the weaving – while there is still time – start the blog – Okay – look back and what do I see?  

I know my stream of consciousness, my soliloquy, may come off fragmented on your computer screen -

Labyrinth {life itself} – Theseus {courage to determine fate} - Ariande {guide and soror mystica} – Augustine {to reflect on the past} – Thomas Aquinas {in a methodical way} - Hieronymus Bosch – {My dreams} – Nautilus {of the many stages} – Bruegel {stark and raw} – Hesse {of the spirit and the flesh} – Joyce {the appreciation of beauty and the way out} – Daedulus {to rise above} – de Chardin {science and religion} – Icarus {to know one’s limits} – The teachers {see the other road} – Threads {to look for patterns} – Threes (3) {to choose among many} – Fates {the end is the same, the way there may differ} – Nymphs {Lord, make me chaste, but not yet} – Graces {to see beauty, to seek peace, to cultivate happiness} – Waterhouse {beauty and mythology} – Homer’s Odyssey {the journey home} – Athena {wise mentor} – Indians {earth centered} – Whitman {dynamically alive} - Emerson {ethics and nature} - Thoreau {nature and human} – Borges {textual labyrinths} -  Neruda {earthly flesh} – Petrarch {to see her as a gift} – Schopenhauer {defiantly synthetical} – Neitzche {defiantly visionary} – D.H. Lawrence {artistic heart and its navigator} - Muses {I am grateful for the sensory awareness . . . a blessing and a curse!} – T.S. Eliot {somber mood} – Hemingway {body grounded}- Rilke {soul aflight} – Goethe {renaissance mind} – Dante’s Divine Comedy {the journey to soul} – Umberto Eco {textual mirrors} – Vico {history matters} - Rimbaud {poetry matters}-  Mnemosyne {to respect the past} – Kronos {to understand the passing of time} – Kairos {to make the most of the opportunity} – Graeae and Senex {wisdom and experience} – Sally + Diana + Lisa + Susan + Kristi + Julia + Celeste + Melissa {I am forever grateful} - So after all that – Where do I stand? – What is my position? – Agnostic? – Gnostic? – Theist? – Scientist? – Buddhist? – Platonist? – Arisotelian? – Rimorrisonbaudian? – Romaniticist? – Am I with Faust? – Am I with Dawkins and Wilson? – Am I with Hawkings? – Am I Abel? – Am I the gamekeeper? – Am I a Glass Bead Player? – Am I with God? – Am I with myself? –Dies irae? – Paradise found or lost? – What is still missing? – The answer was in a book – and a memory – both subjective and universal – First my memory – Flash back to the school days – Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451 – and the question posed – “If you had to memorize one book (become the book – you are the book) – which one would it be? – And my pick? – Dante’s The Divine Comedy – which was a pretty good trick – a rabbit out of the hat – But I remember the Czar – His choice stopped the teacher in his tracks – Ulysses by James Joyce – I remember thinking – Can he say that? – Isn’t that book illegal or something? – And of course – if the Czar mentioned it – then the floodgates were opened – the freshmen looked around at each other as though God himself had spoken – If the Czar picked it – it must be read – put that on your list – but of course we had no idea why we should – it’s just that the Czar endorsed it – but then when I snuck in – and found another Joyce book – The Portrait of the Artist as Young Man – which was dynamite – I fell in love with a sea-bird on the shore – my heart flew – and I turned into a hopeless romantic – but I digress – so from the Czar’s pick to the book I found – Joyce’s Book of Memory by Rickard – which – as fate would have it (and always seems to be that way) – an examination of Joyce’s work –“Ulysses” – as a mnemotechnic –{a Mnemosynthetic device} – and from there I think this – it is time – 

Dante – who took the maxim “Know thyself” and rediscovered it through his writing of The Divine Comedy. It was his apology and redemption and transcendence. It was his own account of his journey in time and the sharing of a lifetime of memories, both good and bad. Lessons: Along your way, be careful of distractions the lead you astray and into a dark wood. Use the past to help guide your way, but do not rely on it exclusively for the future is a river of change. There is the way of the mind and the way of the flesh. Try to find the middle way. Emotions, passions, intellect,  mind,  soul,  spirituality, reason, self-reflect, and observe oneself in one’s own time. To know ourselves in history. To discover both worlds during the time we have. The outer voyage upon the seas with Ulysses and the inner one with Dante. It is a comfort and it is good to know that others have struggled with it as well. I am not alone. It is my journey but have I done anything to share what it was like? So many years but they go so quickly. What matters in the end? Love. Yes, love. How did one love? The most difficult journey of them all and that is why I am lost as well. So easy to say and so easy to know, but so hard to practice. I am whirlwind and find myself seeing both sides. I am at this point getting older and still no wiser, just knowing a little bit more stuff, still seeking, still on the journey, still wanting and craving. When will it calm down? When does the desire for more and more end? More knowledge? More pleasure? Maybe that is why Dante called it ‘The Divine Comedy’ One big joke? Maybe it is. I mean – If you don’t know yourself after all these years – but you can’t really know until to create the inventory of your-self…

To be continued… Thanks, Scott D. Wright