Jul 22, 2015 Uncategorized
Twist
© July 21st, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
What do I see when I narrow my eyes
And stare back into a person I knew?
I see you still.
And you are a wraith,
A twisted, curling thing
Of memory, like a tight
DNA curve of smoke
From a dead fire.
Yes, I see you
Standing within that
Smoke, and I stagger,
Shielding stricken eyes.
You stare back, eyes ablaze,
Your body a fist
Your mind a knot
Your soul a twist
And you throw back your head
And howl at the moon
Which pours white milk
Into your parched throat
You raise your hands, and shout
Into the space between us
Where that which grew, so rich
So green, so luminous with life
Turned into a desert, filled
With desire that tastes like ashes.
You call, but it’s a whisper
Blown aside by a harsh wind.
I see you.
And I rear back, stagger into the wind
Shouting, tasting a thing
Whose name I’ve forgotten,
Whose voice resembles a tenderness
I seem to remember in dreams.
And yet, and yet
I seem to remember
That smile of yours
Filled with hope that raised
Its head, and smiled,
Wings pushing skyward.
We are, and we are not.
Always, and forever.
All that we once knew
All that we once were
All that we will be
All that we saw
All we will see
All pour into this
Crucible.
If it can stand so much,
How much more will it take?
This container for the
Thing contained?
All will melt
In this crucible,
All will meld
With the crucible
And time will twist
It into its own
Möbius strip.
Then, you and I
Will stand front and back,
Back and front,
Full of desire
Full of want
Full of despair
Full of disgust
Full of each other
Twisting like a snake
In the space of our
Limbic life, while
The moon pours her milk
Into our parched,
Shouting, aching throats.
While the past and the present
Curl, nesting into each other
We walk through the fire
Of our eternal days,
Turning into smoke.
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Tags: #Original Poetry, Memory
Feb 17, 2015 Original Poetry
Is This What Dying Feels Like?
©February 17th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
SIlence and darkness
Press down, down
Memory packed down
Like Arctic snow,
Now melting,
Ready to release
Plumes of methane
From old monsters
Buried in the deep,
And she thinks,
That letter! I forgot
To burn that letter!
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Tags: #Death, Arctic snow, Dying, Memory, Methane
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
Jan 29, 2014 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Forgetting
©By Vijaya Sundaram
(Begun on January 28th, and continued on January 29, 2014)
My entire life has been a long process of forgetting.
This is not to say that I forget all who have done me a kindness, or been good to me, or have helped me, or have influenced me profoundly. I remember them and bless them, and thank them in my mind every day.
This is not to say that I deny people from the past, or slight them in memory.
It’s just that I cannot handle too much memory. I feel weighted down with it. Something gives. The names or faces of people sometimes get buried deep. Yes, I know it happens to all of us to a greater or lesser degree, but every forgetting by me seems both a blessing and a betrayal on my part.
And then, I berate myself. Who are you? Are you so important that you cannot remember someone who remembers you vividly? Do you think you’re greater than they are?
I know it’s not that, though. It’s just that everything is too much for me to bear. Remembering is too much for me to bear. Any memory, whether it be sharply defined, or nebulous and hazy, brings me to a deep place of introspection or sadness. I don’t like it.
I don’t wish to live in the past. I like sloughing it off. Perhaps my forgetting is consciously unconscious. I will never really know, for sure.
I was remembering my father yesterday (as I do, every day). I remembered what memory means, meant, to him.
My father had the memory of an elephant. He always recalled people, events from his past, and historical events – history mattered to him. He was often shocked when he’d mention a name of a relative or a friend of his, or someone we’d all known from my childhood, and I wouldn’t remember. He was genuinely startled and (I suspect, upset) by this. Somewhere within him, I think that he might have feared that I might forget him. I haven’t, of course — how could I? I still see him vividly, both as he was at the end, with tubes and medical apparatus attached to him in a hospital, as he lay dying of liver cancer, and as the young man he was, when he took us on his motorbike in the city of Pune, India. I remember him as the middle-aged man with jaundice, to whom I read P.G. Wodehouse, making him chuckle in the summer afternoons in Madras, India. I cannot forget how everyone adored him. I also remembered that if they were upset with him, they somehow couldn’t hold on to it in his presence. I can summon up in my mind’s eye, the breadth of his expansiveness when we were in a room filled with people. Some of that expansiveness, that Jovian capacity of his rubbed off on me, I think. I expand, too, in a room of people, but, like my mother, I also know how to shrink back into myself.
(There will be more about my mother later, and not in this piece. This piece is about memory.)
So, my father remembered everything, and was great at telling anecdotes. He would fill my eyes with scenes from his childhood. He would, later in life, talk about his travels to places around the world. He was a restless person, I think, trapped in conventional marriage and fatherhood. While he was great at being a kind and loving dad (and I know he adored my mother), I think he probably wished to escape, sometimes. Those travels he did (from business circumstances over which he had no control, and which came at great cost to my family) would be the stuff of his tales. He always came off sounding great in those stories. He remembered things beautifully.
And yet, he did this thing that disquieted me – he’d adjust his memories, repaint them, re-upholster them to suit his liking. It was almost as if any painful moments of the past had no right to be, and only pleasant things remained. He never, ever recollected painful things in our presence – not when we were young, not when we were old. Any of his remembrances of difficult times would paint him in a good light, but never others in a bad light, and although he did belittle others, sometimes, to make himself look good, he was never malicious.
This lack of balance that he exhibited towards his past, in terms of softening it, creates a curious imbalance in me. While I don’t try and soften it, per se, I remember only the better bits.
I don’t like to dwell on painful things. What point is there in doing that?
I dislike talking about embarrassing things. I find no pleasure in turning them into charming stories. Some people do that beautifully, and I love hearing them, but I’m no good at them.
I prefer not to hold grudges. I want to forgive, always. It hurts me to not forgive. When someone who has harmed me is nice, I act like a puppy and melt towards them. I don’t forget, though. A part of me is still wary. However, I always forgive.
However, I don’t forgive myself, ever, for hurting anyone.
I dislike re-hashing the past (and yet, I do rehash it with my siblings, something that I would suppose many siblings do).
I vow not to repaint the past to suit my liking. In my mind, when I realize that I did wrong, hurt people’s feelings, didn’t speak up when I should have, spoke up too harshly, when I could have been kinder, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Wrong is wrong. There are no excuses.
However, I will not talk about that to all and sundry. Why should I? It’s none of anybody’s business, except mine, my husband’s (because he should know), and the person I wronged or hurt in any way. The problem with people (that includes me), is that once we have a picture in our heads about how someone was, or how someone behaves, we find it hard to dislodge that memory of that person. It occludes our vision of the person who is currently before us.
I may not repaint the past to make myself look too good when I wasn’t, but like my father, I tend to dwell on pleasant things. In that instance, I am like him.
The past has no meaning for me, except that I have to admit that it has taught me things. Sometimes, although I dismiss nostalgia as indulgence, the past wafts over me like a perfume-laden breeze, or a magic carpet. And then, I let it bear me away, and I ache with longing for when I was little, and played in the dirt, or when I ate gulkhand made from sweet roses in the garden of a neighborhood acquaintance in Poona (now Pune), India.
I remember missing the school bus one day, because I was too intent, in my kindergarten innocence, on picking fresh, ripe fruit from the tamarind trees in my school grounds. I managed to get home, by flagging down a rickshaw, and taking the driver through the tortuous bus-route to get me home (I didn’t know my address, you see, but I knew the way home — I have always known the way home in every sense of the phrase). The amazing thing is that he got me home safely. My parents were so grateful — that rickshaw driver was a good man, who must have chuckled at my innocent brashness. I remember expecting to be driven home, and I was! Only as a grown-up did I fully realize how dangerous the situation could have been.
I remember many things, but they are like things which happened in a dream, to somebody else, and yet, I know that somebody very well, as well as I do myself. Oh, it’s confusing!
I am amazed that the creature that I was is the same entity as the creature that I am now. And yet, so much has been sloughed off. So much has been rebuilt. So much is about new memories overlaying old ones.
I feel like an archaeological dig sometimes. When I try and remember things, re-member, as in re-attaching all the parts of myself that seem to have floated off into the deep space of the deep past, surprising things surface. It is not that I dislike my past – it is that for some reason, it seems irrelevant to my conscious mind. And yet …
My cells remember. My blood, constantly renewed, remembers. My eyes remember. My nose and ears remember. My skin remembers. My feet remember.
Songs come floating back on a stray breeze into my mind. I stumble upon a line from a book or a movie, and a whole chunk of my childhood, or young adulthood breaks off and floats towards me. I take care to avoid a collision, but as it floats by me, I admire the crystalline beauty of an encapsulated past. Frozen in its depths are images, faces, songs, people in mid-action, reflections in pools, sensations, tastes, colors. Some of them lack context. They come and go, little bubbles of memory, untethered to other memories. Some, however, are linked, like creatures in a dream move about in that frozen landscape, holding hands.
(Mixed metaphors, anyone?)
How can we ever get old, when we remember on that level?
And yet, I forget so many of the specifics – names of people who drifted in and out on the tide, names of places I’ve been and bus numbers of buses I rode for years. I forget what it was that made me drift away from certain people. I forget why I couldn’t bear the smell of someone or something. I forget why I was completely unaware of things when I was a certain age, and painfully aware of every slight, every injury at a much later age. I cannot seem to understand why other people’s lies or disingenuous behaviors made me so angry and so upset that I lost my capacity for compassion, or for distance.
I spend much of my life forgetting things. Was this the result of conscious choice, or is it rationalization after the fact? Is all this “forgetting” a measure of protection? (For, I feel that my capacity for memory is finite, and I cannot overload this particular camel with the last straw that will break its back.)
The fact is I’ll never know.
What I do know is that I have met a whole lot of people in my life, from years of teaching, performing, living. I wish I could recall all of them. Every one of them gave me something, and I’m grateful to all of them. Because of all of those who gave me perspective, criticism, love, support, respect and kindness, I think I’ve become better at being a person, at being a friend, at being fully aware of my actions. Isn’t that what the past is supposed to do for us, not load us down with pointless facts, but amorphous experience?
I guess my past has taught me, after all.
I hope so.
_____________________________ The End ______________________________
Tags: #Forgiveness, #Nostalgia, Forgetting, Growing up ïn India, Memory, Remembering the past