The Shadows of a Memory

[zachwave]

You stand there. Gazing forward, glossed over on whatever object or scene is ahead of you. The world is around you.
You sit there. Twiddling an object in your hand, playing with it with indifference. The task is beneath you.
You lay there. Staring at the ceiling, turning to the wall. Silence and darkness surround you.
You aren't there. You're within, you're inside. Memories and dreams flow through you.

How do you view memories? Are you the in the first person, replaying a memory as an actor? I find quite often that when you are in a memory, that you are not yourself. Do you find that is the case?

It's a perplexing feeling, certainly an eerie feeling if you catch wise to it. You are but your shadow, silently watching, an audience to your history. You (the memory you) feels almost doll like, an actor on a stage of a play you've already seen. Yet each time you replay that video it seems a little different from the last time you viewed it, doesn't it? Yet you are no puppet master, as you disconnect yourself from the world around you to play back, you find often it awkward and cumbersome to navigate some of your most important memories. Why is that?

You try to manipulate your memory, you play scenarios in your head. Feels as if you are now director, never the actor doesn't it? The memory into dream, but never tangible as if you are there, that is for the moment it is never the memories of once was. Fast foward, rewind, cut the tape, swap the palette, start a new scene. Difficult to grasp, to think about how you experience a memory is a memory in of itself isn't it?

That feeling, it begins to creep into reality at times, doesn't it? You have moments where you detatch, you pull back from your systems. You walk, you talk, you carry forward and yet your mind is behind you. You are the shadow. You watch yourself toil away, walk towards the horizon. Put your dishes away, continue your routines yet you are over the shoulder peering over, not absolute sure which direction you are going.

The realization that the memories are being made as if the shutter never stops, the reel perpetually spins.

You wake up, a dream, a nightmare. Cold sweat, deep breathing, ears ringing. The memory is there, fresh as a gaping wound. Still your hand feels warm from her grasp, the smiles, the muscle still echoes that sensation. If you don't write it down, you don't log it, it is gone or corrupted. Yet you are graced with the memory of the memory.

The shadows of a memory.

 

[charlie]

If we wish to define a memory; If we wish to keep a memory, we must first know what it is to experience a moment. These moments in time which are always capturing us and escaping us, are just those things which we retain. The nature of memories being hard to grasp, or hard to explain, is in my opinion, that which makes memories the same.

---

The moments we experience are strung together. Not at all like a slideshow, much more like currents. Like little paper boats floating along a river, so are our fields of observation. But unlike the boat, we retain these moments passed. Sure the boat could get caught on a branch hanging over the river, on a piece of driftwood or a rock splitting the current; the paper boat could get torn or muddy and carry that mud along into each new current, but we are not these boats. We don’t simply retain the experiences from up stream, but we can remember them, and re-experience them at will. And at that moment, when we decide to go back, and we realize that we are not merely floating along, but we will to float along, is the source of this unsettling realization, that we’re not simply experiencing, but choosing to be a member in all that is passing. May we never stop choosing to participate.

…

Of course, this is a gross simplification, because we can’t always remember anything. Sometimes our brains shut off at times, or our hearts refuse to let us experience moments passed.