It's Memories All The Way Down

If Memories Change, Do We Change? Where Are We, Were We Here? Are We Real?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This is a free association about memory, I’m not sure what sparked it, maybe it will come back to me later, the answer (like typos) probably comes after I hit “send”. I’m about to finish a book, and write a book’s worth of stories and essays on top of that, all of that will be built from what’s inside my mind.

I’ll begin by remembering a few plots about the same recurring question in film.

Movies

It is no coincidence that many of our stories begin with a mystery: Who Are We?

You are not your father, he did love you, you don’t have to run the company like he did. Someone is here to help convince you that it’s your idea. Meanwhile that someone’s wife, who took her own life thinking she escaping a dream made by her husband, keeps coming back to turn things upside-down. It all happens in a never-ending waking dream which could go on forever.

You have a past we made for you, we are your real family, these 30 girls, trained espionage agents and killers, are your family. The man who raised you is not your father, you are not his daughter, but he chose to save you from us.

You obey these cards, then shoot. You were a war hero, congressional medal of honor. When I show you the right cards, you will shoot a man about to become president.

Your name is Anderson, you work for the largest software company in the world, you are not the “chosen one”, who over and over tries to reawaken mankind.

You are a lost spirit who’s forgotten who he is, trying to help a boy who sees ghosts.

You wake up on a fishing boat, you can do amazing things but you don’t know how or why, you just can do them, but the one thing you can’t do is remember who you are.

Inception, Hanna, Manchurian Candidate, the Matrix, Sixth Sense, Bourne Identity

There are more examples in film but they’re shadows when it comes to real life.

When the answers come, they can be both uplifting and shattering, they can make and break us.

Identity

Our door to reality is our minds, powered by electromagnetic phenomena unfolding as biological chemistry. We are making and deleting reality without end.

The impression of memories is an imprinting of identity. This can change as soon as something new happens or we do something new or both. The imprint, the mark left on our minds is different, it’s not the same old stamp on the papers of our experiences.

I used to be all of one thing and not the other, time passes and that thing is strange and alien to me, that memory becomes unreal, was I really that way, was I that person?

Before the light in the last room is turned off, what and how do I remember who I am?

Dreams

I dreamed about the same woman a handful of times,
scattered over the last few years
This same person is lost in conversation with me
and then our words trail off not long after sunrise.
Was she a composite memory or an entirely new constructed being?
There have been experiences just like that, incredible conversations
She felt as real as you and me (whatever that means) and I wonder,
Was she someone I forgot and now remembered, are we real or are we just memories which come and go through everyone’s lives, including our own?
I hope she comes back, just to finish that talk.

Dreams become sneak preview trailers for a waking world’s greenlighted releases, there it’s a reboot of an old hit or an epic flop, it all happens “in a world” (in that voice) where anything’s possible.

Sometimes, they’re mashup drafts of whatever or whoever we don’t want to remember, it’s so bad we want to forget, but there it is in front of us.

Sometimes I want to forget and pray for deletion’s mercy, and sometimes I want to remember for pity’s sake.

Family

I think about the elders in my family, and how their memories are beginning to fade.

Sometimes different things are happening, including the following:

They lose their way, sometimes they do the same thing they’ve done for decades, as if on autopilot.

They find their way to people long passed or faraway, sometimes they are young again and the world is new.

They find their way back, but sometimes they never return.

Passed down old habits riding on top of remembered muscle memory going through the motions, are passed down to the next generation, from a many-times-great grand-ancestor’s rites-of-passage.

If you’re lucky it’s the luxury of a loved ritual you’ve now planted into your mind, someone and something that lived as if it were real inside the mind of someone who lived and died centuries before you, handed down to you because you’re here. Maybe you pass along a muscle memory that keeps flexing for centuries.

You learn to cherish those anchors in tempests, breadcrumb trails in the over-grown forest, spools of thread through crumbling mazes not yet cut by the 3 Fates, which remain in place. Those are gifts.

History and Art

These include the world’s breadcrumb trails back home, the fairy tales we tell ourselves about who we were, and the way we want to remember and be remembered. If nothing else survives then that’s all that remains to say that’s who we are, were, and will be if we remember it.

Cave paintings, campfire recitations, carvings of bone and stone, clay and wood, etchings on metal, blood and plant pigments on animal skins, inks on paper, back to electromagnetic media, modern metallic stand-ins for the electromagnetic fireworks within our brains. We were here, we did this. This is what happened.

We’re all trying to remind and reintroduce ourselves to each other, even if it’s thousands of years later, about what happened and who we were.

Whether it happened that way, or at all, is not the point. It’s a moment in time inside the amber of a museum, and that’s the way it was.

Reality

Maybe it’s all a dream under the furrowed brow of whatever is greater than the greatest, older than the oldest, and stronger than the strongest, at repose after building all that is, was, and will be, a conveyor belt built of creation, ladled with infinite creative facility, and layered over the blank canvas of the firmament of all.

And the one who wears the furrowed brow is remembered and forgotten, under the furrowed brow yet again of another, who in turn is remembered and forgotten under yet another furrowed brow, and yet another, and another…. All that matters were those moments in their minds.

It’s memories all the way down.