If Memory Serves …
… Then Who Is Its Master?
Why do I remember? What purpose does it serve? I can’t feel it, taste it, smell it … I delude myself that I can see, perhaps even hear, it … but I am a liar: there is no Past or Future, merely the ever Present … but faced with the terrifying loneliness of that prospect, we tell ourselves stories … shadowplays, flickering and false, on the cave walls of our minds, to comfort our selves in the cold and the dark, whilst we pray to the spirit of hope for another way, another day … that we might find peace at last, sure of our place and purpose in the World.
We are each a personality disorder in the making, on the borderline, engaged in a ceaseless orgy of onanistic self creation that never ends until the day we die and is then dragged, kicking and screaming, beyond its timely demise by those who remember us … frogmarching our memory toward a future we neither know nor want, down the corridors of concept, percept and precept … neurowaltzing us down the passages of Time … an untimely and ultimately fruitless union meeting of minds … sacrificing truth to the falacious, salacious desires of the living.
If memory serves, then it is fighting on the other side, meandering to a different drummer, grooving to another beat … supplying us with propagandist, voyeuristic flashes of someone else’s life … (pre-) fabricated tidbits of moments that maybe never were, but might have been … pinpricks of existence in the otherwise black night sky above the mindscape of the Present … awash with the monochromatic dazzle-haze of hopeful fantasy … clouded with reasons scudding across the event horizon of the Future, portrayed by us, charlatans that we are, as portents of next year, next month, next week, tomorrow, later, in a moment, now, then … yet no more substantial, nor less fleeting, than the half lives of the electrons whose flow forms the ever present biomechanical, psychoneural feedback loops we call our selves … freefalling through the vapourware of immutable personality, of empirical being … yet, ultimately, fading into nothingness as the smoke disperses to reveal the mirror facade we call I, me, my, mine …
Descartes said too much … Wittgenstein could say nothing … Orwell said it all.
I say “Enough!”
Let us free ourselves of the tyranny of memory … of it’s fascist boot-boy qualia, masquerading as Fact, Truth, Knowledge … when all they, and it, in reality are are the mythic harbingers of doomed lives past or yet to be.
Let us question its verisimilitude … its golem like stature … and revel in the possibilities of the unknown … the what ifs and buts.
For Truth is a fiction designed to keep us from ever freeing ourselves of the chains of Existence — there is naught but the here and now … all else is falsehood.
We are human beings, not human has beens: lay to rest the ghost in the machines, machineries, machinations of memory and revel in the Present — for what once was may never have been … and tomorrow may never come.
