Brain Food #370
Memory and imagination
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
While taking some time to think and write about the past year, and decade, Soren Kierkegaard’s words come to mind: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In the mad tension of the present moment, we may catch ourselves often speeding ahead without considering what has passed, and what it has taught us.
Even so, how much of what we remember is true? Oliver Sacks often claimed we cannot trust our memories, for “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” Even when writing in a journal, or recounting a memory to a friend, we are trapped by our own consciousness.
This may be momentarily sad, but it is also entirely liberating. Though history cannot theoretically be rewritten, the way we let us affect it can be changed, reimagined and recreated. The act of remembering the past is therefore not just necessary, but crucial as an act of self-preservation.
Memory by Magritte depicts the head of a statue, its eye smeared with a red stain that resembles blood. It could be a painful memory that refuses to let her see things clearly, or simply a dash of colour, giving some much-need intensity to the dullness of the moment. Either way, disconnected from the body, the head could only be remembering a portion of the truth.
