:hopping on the bandwagon:

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Memory is our reconstruction of past events. It may seem rather futile to ever attain an accurate rendering of the past, because memory is by definition always subjective. So the past only exists as we know it in fragments, in the pictures we take to memorialize a moment, in the selectively remembered (and forgotten) encounters and conversations we have with others.

Of course, the resulting narrative we create out of these fragments vary greatly from person to person, as are the fragments that each individual chooses (I know, I am implying that remembering is an active, not passive act) to remember.

What I wonder though, is what happens to the bits that are forgotten and left behind. We know the past through the memories of the present we have, but is there some kind of black hole where the selectively unremembered bits fall into?

I think, maybe, that the role of the historian is to tunnel through the outer layer of memories to delve into this black hole, to salvage as many forgotten bits of the past as possible. Memories are clues, telling us where these black holes may or may not exist.

We also create our own personal black holes, at a personal (or psychological, to be Freudian) level. Things too painful to remember we choose to forget - or as I remember reading in some article on psychology piece in The Economist, certain chemicals in our brain become numbed or immobilized when we experience great tragedy, that make us physiologically incapable of remembering them.

I think I've been surprisingly efficient at creating my own relationship black holes. It's not even that I'm not comfortable bringing the topic up, its almost as if they no longer exist in my memory and I have to think extra extra hard to visualise them again. Yet, at a very subconscious level I know that these past relationships were a great part of my past which still continue to reverberate in the present insidiously.

What is the opposite of black holes? I can't quite think of an appropriate term yet. White mountains? White elephants? Memory?
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Wei Ting hopped on at 7:47 PM