Memorycemetery

There was one scientist called Mr. Lorenz quite a while ago. He was a peaceful man and naturalist, one of the founders of behaviourist theory for which he was awarded a noble (The Nobel?) prize. He studied birds’ and animals’ behaviour and discovered imprints, or programmed patterns which all of us follow.

Illustration 1: portrait of programmed chicken

In one of his famous experiments he separated ducks from their eggs. He fed and took care of the new born ducks. They accepted him as a mother duck and after they grew up even tried to copulate with his shoes. Red wellington boots, named after an English aristocrat with a surname starting with a capital W, not the ducks of other sex were the object of their lust. I know what you are probably thinking about. No, I am not going in that direction. I am not going to make a parallel with “as seen on TV” culture, e.g a pair of trainers, named after Greek goddess of victory. I will not bore you with my thoughts on how Goddess Nike became Nike TM. I will not spoil your pleasure of coming up with allegories yourself. I will merely stick to the subject of this post, which is memory. If you wonder why did I start from Dr. Lorenz then, I had some reasons to do so. Moreover, I would like to mention I conducted some field research on animals’ behaviour as well, as you can see from the illustrations below. Unfortunately my conclusions and results of my brainstorm were classified and I was stripped of honour being awarded anything, apart of couple of kicks of angry cat’s owner. Let’s skip details.

Illustrations 2,3. Possible rotations of cats’ head and glucose impact on brain activity.

I have a friend, whose girlfriend was a bio-semiotic. If I am not messing up things again, she was studying behaviour models and language patterns of cascalot whales. Apparently she found out what  have strong spiritual belief or a religion which they share via means of telepathic contact (or undetected ways of communication), as they engaged in some seemingly pointless (from our point of view) collective rituals. Cascalots are not exception. Elephants are known to visit their dead. They’d come to the bones of their ancestors, and spend some time there, touching their skulls with trunks and generally having sad look. Memento mori. Animals have memories and dreams, and behave pretty much as we do, and vice versa. In a sense, humans are developed animals, driven by instincts and chasing seemingly pointless things (money? young years? spiritual beliefs?). Those were the results of her observations.

Drawing up conclusions of my own research I came across words of P.B.Shelley: “If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.” Furthermore, I found some striking parallels in our - my and cat’s behavior patterns. For instance, as much as the annoyed cat in question tried to put end to our harmless joint research, I tried to avoid any kind of annoyances in our life. I struggled with it a bit to no success. After a bit of thought, I decided to find roots of annoyance, and take them out once and for all. Basically, I think, we get annoyed if we can’t do something, or can’t escape something, or have to do something instead of something we want to do etc. If you follow me, annoyance arises when we are in the position when we are not entirely ourselves, and want to be someone or somewhere else. On another hand, if we will stick to common sense, we are there we should be for a reason; it would be a naive thing to think what we are here because of accidental chain of events, or believe that we know better where we should be or could be. To put it simple, we do not know our own good. If our life is a maze of choices, which we have to make in hundreds on daily basis, small and big ones, we should employ our intelligence in finding the way out of it. Say, if you are in labyrinth and have to choose between going left or right, your chances in finding the exit are somethat 50/50. If we have to choose something again, our chances are 25%, or 1 in 4. Et cetera, diminishing rapidly. As most of the people do not know what they want to achieve and we generally can not really make choices based on logic (as we do not know all the reasoning behind the events and can’t see the future), we take chances to wonder endlessly and chaoticaly in this labyrinth of life, with chances to find the exit statistically neglegible. We, most probably, wouldn’t recognize this exit, even if we will come across it. People also have patterns in their behaviour and collective instincts, similar to that of chicken. So we end up not even making choices ourselves, but following the pack and implanted by society models of behaviour.

Can this vicious circle of wandering back and thro be broken? There is a rule of finding the way out of the maze. It’s simple. Always take left or right, whenever you have to choose. Eventually the exit (if it exists, of course; I presume yes, as there exists the entrance) would be found. So, what I did for a while was simple. Whenever I’m offered a choice, I’d say: Yes. Whatever is on offer. Always accept. Yes, Yes, Yes. I refused making choices myself. It just seemed difficult on the first glance. Actually it was easy and life became a very interesting adventure. Life will take you somewhere anyway, so why not help it a bit? I didn’t last long, though. I admit my defeat. Imprints took over again; the clarity of being in the moment was lost. Instead of copulating with the Ultimate Truth and Absolute, I am after my symbolic wellingtons.

 And this is what this post is about: memory of coming to the point where I could make this point. Memory about being human. If the memory is something, what has happenned, here it is. Descartes  said, “I think therefore I exist”. I would say I exist because I happenned and I accepted that. As Dalarius could put it, I’m still a memory in the making.

Boris Kislitsin

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