Memory is the house we live in that lives in us.
Memory is a genie, not a scribe. It tells us a different story each time we ask it a question.
We should not make a fetish of memory. Actually, it is as important not to remember too much as it is not to remember too little.
There are very few, indeed, of our acts that are not commemorative.
Memory is a counterfeiter with the demeanor of a banker dressed in business clothes. Dream is the same personage dressed in the lavish robes of a pasha insisting on all the indulgences due a sovereign.
One of the many paradoxes of memory is that we often recall our traumas, (that is, they call us back into the experience of terror), in just the way we wish we could recall our pleasures, which, however, pale in memory, losing just the immediacy which made them so valuable in the first place. However, if they did not lose what made them so attractive in the first place, they might so beguile us that we lost our way in the world, renouncing an essential alertness for self-absorption.
Suddenly an entire period of our life becomes a fresco, or a series of frescoes, on a wall in our mind. We stand and admire. A figure becomes animated, starts to speak and move about. We nod in recognition as the scenes change before our eyes. Our relationship to it all is altered, as if we had been released from within the fresco. We look on in a way we could not previously have imagined.
When we are away, as commonly happens, visiting that past which exists only for us in secluded precincts of our own minds, we are left behind to carry on our precious ordinary everyday lives as the presence of an absence, a bookmark that must find a way to go on not only reading but also writing.
Our most important memories are embedded so deeply in us that we do not even know them except as part of our sense of ourselves.
If only we are prepared to listen, every moment of our lives converses in each moment, which opens up to hold and blend them all. In this way, time travel is not only readily available but also quite ordinary. Time travels with us within us even as we travel in it. This relationship of reciprocal reverberating inclusion gives our lives their deepest resonance and reality.
Once we have taken on a sufficient cargo of experiences, our memories do not present themselves primarily as sequenced narratives full of pictures and details, but rather as something more akin to colored washes of feelings that sweep over us and move us in one direction or other. We can, if we so choose or if necessity requires it, zero in on a portion of one of these feeling colors and retrieve a narrative. However, as time goes on, something within us says, “But is that really necessary?
Remembering can be release as well as clinging. Paradoxically, remembering can mix the two.