remember?

"Have I met you somewhere before?"


"She stares at me and searches her
memory, but in the end shakes her head. "As you may know, in this Town,
memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember
and things we cannot remember. You seem to be among the things I
cannot. Please forgive me."


"Of course," I say. "It was not important."


"Perhaps we have met before. This is a small town."


"I arrived only a few days ago."


"How many days ago?" she asks,
surprised. "Then you must be thinking of someone else. I have never
been out of this Town. Might it have been someone who looks like me?"


"I suppose," I say.

"Still, I have the impression that
elsewhere we may all have lived totally other lives, and that somehow
we have forgotten that time. Have you ever felt that way?"

"No," she says.
"Perhaps it is because you are a Dreamreader. The Dreamreader thinks very differently from ordinary people."

I cannot believe her.



- from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World



For
me, the only thing that remains the same no matter where i live is
memory. it is the only thing that belongs to me or that, maybe, i
belong to. It seems like everytime I gain a new one an old one
resurfaces.

There are layers of memory. Some of it is just background, static,
tone, setting: smells, the coolness or warmth of the air, the colors in
a region's sunsets, the lighting in a familiar coffee shop, the noises
you hear when you wake up or before you fall asleep.



then there are the memories that, for whatever aesthetic reasons, my
mind (and, i guess, my heart) has assigned significance. that's not to
say that the static/setting memories are insignificant but sometimes
they're a texture that isn't three-dimensional. they don't always move
or speak.



i'm beginning to wonder if all memory is is a library catalog card
for an emotion, for a feeling. the memories are unique but the feelings
are generic: safety, longing, joy, loneliness, pain, love, confusion...

what i can't figure out is why we all have such different memories. I
know we all have (some similar but mostly) very different experiences,
consciousness being variable and all that, but why does my brother
remember the gate in our yard more than i do but not remember the
narrow path on the side of the house as well as i do?



is memory just a finicky editor of a short story anthology? the
Rationalist philosopher Spinoza divides perception into two categories:
adequate or inadequate. the given here is that perception
(experience/memory) is what constitutes our own knowledge. he keeps it
simple at first. but shit gets sort of hectic as he starts to break
down what adequate thought it.

there is the first kind of knowledge which is in two parts. a) is knowledge from random experience. this
is knowledge "from singular things which have been represented to us
through the senses in a way which is mutilated, confused, and without
order for the intellect." like how i associate Pavement with the smell
of wet concrete because, once, i saw them play after a thunderstorm.

b)is knowledge from signs, "for example, from the fact that, having
heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain
ideas of them, like those through which we imagine the things." S is
for Snake kind of stuff. The connection between the two kinds of
knowledge is that they don't have rational order.



the second kind of knowledge is gained "from the fact that we have
common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things." an idea
is adequate if it has common properties and the way that all of us
deduce its common properties happens in the same way.

essentially, the guy was saying that perception is subjective. memory
is subjective. your reality is subjective. but that there are a few
exceptions. those being the common experiences. collectively calling
that shiny thing "light bulb," etc.



but wait. it gets crazier.

the third kind of knowledge is "intuitive knowledge," which is the
understanding of the "essence of things." he never really clarifies but
most people think he's saying that knowledge from experience and
knowledge from signs are inadequate ideas because you're perceiving
without seeing the causes that determine them to be. but intuitive
knowledge would mean knowing every single variable that threw something
into your path of perception. the variables are infinite. at the root,
though, he sees this ultimate kind of knowledge as a means of
understanding a perception as necessary rather than contingent. an idea
that's on all kinds of religious maps as a part of the road to
enlightenment, from Buddhism to the Serenity Prayer.



so is the ultimate understanding of memory actually enlightenment? all of these wicked smart people are way over my head



the point is, i've been trying to write this short story where memory
is the protagonist (or antagonist) and failing terribly and wondering
how the fuck Murakami does it so (seemingly) effortlessly and
ingeniously. and trying to wrap my head around memory which is,
apparently, just a vicious circle.



is this why people drink to forget?