Sep 30, 2014 Original Poetry
A Sleep-Prayer for My Daughter*
©September 30th,2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Blue descending, silken-deep
Like midnight promising her sleep
Darkness, spilling sweet moonlight,
Ease her mind with gentle night.
Let her sleep, and let her dream
Let her visions palely gleam
In quiet streams, in forest glades
In hollows where no one has strayed
Hold her sweetly in your arms,
Oh Sleep and Night, and bring no harm.
Let her smile in sleep, and think
No thoughts of death. And let her drink
From wells of fun, of play and song
Show her where she might belong.
Then, float her boat of happiness
On moonlit streams with no distress
That brook of dreams where she
Will sing, and read, and quietly be.
For childhood’s full of dreams and fears
Give her strength and spare her tears.
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Tags: #Daughter, #Love, #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, Dreams and visions, Happiness and peace, Prayer for My Daughter
Sep 30, 2014 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Memory and Self
©September 30th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Someone, and I think it was Oliver Sacks, raised the question (or perhaps the idea) of whether we are a collection of memories, and those memories constitute a “self,” that we identify as our own.
If our memories make up our “self”, what about those who lose their memories? Who are they? Are they truly “self” less? How would they carry on the business of stitching together parts of their day-to-day existence?
What about those who gain false memories? Are they creating a new self? Does that make them real people? Or are they figments of memories given flesh?
Memory is an astonishing, pliant thing. It is also sometimes a dying thing.
Is what we are what we were? What about what we will be?
What about when we’re born? Is the self then just amorphous?
What about those studies where babies are shown as possessing empathy? Where did they gain that? Did they have a sense before of it? Isn’t that a trait that reveals an aspect of a person’s “self”?
What does it mean to be forming into a person?
Does the blueprint already exist, or do we make it up, add, erase, expand and delineate parts of the blueprint of ourselves as we grow older?
If we insist that we are fully formed NOW, does that cut us off from forming some more?
If we are UNformed, does that let us off the hook when we commit a regrettable act? To what extent?
What about knowledge, the kind we add to our store of memories? Does the process of losing knowledge, as in our daily forgetting of things we’ve learned, mean that we’ve wasted some part of our self? Does it simply imply that we might have misplaced what we’ve learned, because it isn’t important right now?
True terror, then, would lie in losing one’s memory, because that would signal the erosion of one’s self.
It’s difficult to just exist – we bring mind and memory into the business of being, and it certainly complicates things. It also makes living fun … I think.
And of course, I wouldn’t know any better, since I only know what I know from the place where I stand, and that place houses a collection of memory cells in a bustling beehive of thought.
If I lose any part of it, I would imagine myself canceling myself out, until I’m just a face smiling in the trees,
and then just a smile,
and then, just the ghost of a smile,
and then, blue sky amidst green trees
And then … a voice carried away by the breeze
And then, someone else’s memory of
That smile
The ghost of that smile
That blue sky amidst green trees
That voice …
That breeze …
Then … nothing at all.
And why, oh why, oh why, am I SO attracted to that?
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Tags: An Original Essay by Vijaya Sundaram, Cheshire Cat, Empathy in babies, Forgetting, Formation of the Self, Losing memory, loss of self, Memory, Oliver Sacks, Self, Selfhood