The Memory Conundrum

 

If lives are lived, memory is formed. As life goes on memories are embedded in the dungeons of the mind, as if they are rich minerals embedded deep under earth. They lie there, dormant, sleepy, and silent. They may have been judged, may have been interpreted by the prism of the consciousness of the memory holder. These judgments and interpretations color the memories and give them a form of their own. These memories, sweet, bitter, joyous, hellish, all get together to make the memory holder what he or she is in this world.

It is strange how much these interpretations change when the memory holder undergoes a change of personality. The memories once sweet could become salty, once bitter could become pale and unworthy, once pale could just brighten up. There was a time I was totally depressed. And all my memories sort of turned bitter or inconsequential. As if they never had any steam, as if the world that passed by eyes never happened or should have happened. As if my memories were the pall bearers of the dead weight I was carrying within me. When I got well and brightened up, the same memories jumped up and shouted to be remembered. To be reinterpreted and judged once again and to throw away the badges of negativity I had placed them under.

Today I talked to my brother who went to IIT kgp just like I did. We talked about our days there. And now those memories won’t leave me. I hated them sometime ago. I wished I wasn’t there. And now I wish I am there again. With friends, with the big banyan trees, with the tea shops with red teeth stained dadas selling bun maska, with the serenity of the library, with the rigour of the classes, with the football matches. The same memories which daunted me when I depressed, now enlighten me when I am not. I feel my interpretations have changed.

Memories can also be deceptive. That is they may not come in their true form. For people like me who suffer from schizophrenia, one has to be really careful with memories. The mind can throw at us things which never happened. Incidents that are imaginary, images which are unreal. As Prof. Nash said when he recovered, the idea is to be rational, to be able to filter out the real from the unreal. To be able to pick out some of them and to be able to closet the others. I am sure this happens with other people too. To varying degrees.

Memories can be connected to each other. Like a string of ribbons, coloured differently. Just like memories have to be interpreted these connections have to be interpreted and reinterpreted too. Our mind does this all the time. And as we change as people, these connections change. The ribbons join themselves in different patterns. A whole new story may emerge out of a labyrinth of facts, an important event can become mundane and a mundane event can suddenly take the form of significance. Ask the historians. They know it the best.

So does one trust the memories? Does one go about feeling them or does one pay no heed to them wafting around the mind as if they are fishes and our mind a deep ocean? Can we actually afford to get rid of them? I am sure in the future there were will some artificial intelligence to achieve this purpose. But as of the present world, it does not seem likely. If one believes the great South American writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his book Love in the time of Cholera, “He was too young to know that the hearts memories eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice, we endure the burden of the past.”