The fifth anniversary of my Father’s death is coming up in
the beginning of June. Part of me would
like to go back to California and visit his grave, then sit along the ever
changing edge of the Pacific and sandy southern beaches. I could stand there and let the wind and
light and earth pass through me. I could
let them swallow me in their solitude and just be. No thoughts, no good, no bad, just tons of
particle-like wave packets vibrating about in a fixed point of space and
time. Don’t worry, this is merely a
thought experiment. If you can imagine
it, does it mean it is possible? (…and
what if you cannot imagine it?)
Alright, if
we take the western view of time as linear with the current inability of large
living organisms like ourselves to be able to move freely about time, what
happens to a person after they die? Do
the dead continue to exist so long as there are people to remember them? And how does the way a person remember us
shape who we are whether living or dead?
I cannot
help but think about The Invention of
Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares when I think of anyone, past, present, living,
dead or even those on the distant shores of the Milky Way. The story of the Invention is about a man alone
on an island which periodically plays the three dimensional images of people
long since deceased. A week of their
life recorded and played out over and over whenever the tide is high. Is that what is like to be yourself in someone
else’s memory? Just a moment in time
that you are a part of with them which can be played over and again? And is that how we are all connected, through
shared memory of individuals linking to one another? …This last thought seems to have gotten away
from me.
The thing
is, I know I do not need to be in the physical space where my Father is buried
to feel whatever I need to feel on an anniversary. I cannot go back and change anything. And with a vivid imagination, I can feel the
same beach sunrays whilst basking in desert sunrays, if I close my eyes.
Another
part of me doesn’t want to go back. I
did this the other day using Google Maps, slowly dragging myself along the
streets I grew up with for twenty years.
Minor changes had occurred but nothing too big, not so much that I
couldn’t find familiar landmarks and haunts.
But being on that street view was like traveling down every single
memory I had on that street concurrently.
Memory piled on top of memory; good moments with painful ones. So much stuff that I had put away and moved
on from came tumbling back. I wasn’t
prepared for it. - Nobody told me about
the dangers of traveling down Memory Lane alone!
Shall I
feel my fear and let it pass through me?
What else can you do?
The best part of Anna
Karenina is the very end when Konstantin Levin states:
I’ll go on getting angry at Ivan the
coachman, I’ll go on arguing, go on expressing my ideas inappropriately, there
will still be a wall between the inmost shrine of my soul and other people,
including my wife; I’ll go on blaming her because of my own fears, then repent…but
from now on my life, my whole life, no matter what happens to me, every second
of it, is not only not meaningless as it was before, but it has the incontestable
meaning of the goodness I have the power to put into it!
Thank goodness we have control over Memory Lane…
Here is some music to go with your travels, M83's Midnight City.
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