Memorycemetery

Do you remember that old movie “Total recall” with Arnold Schwarzenegger? Thinking about self-hypnosis and our abilities to induce memories, I decided to “create” fake memories inside my head. If you ask me why, I would tell you, probably just for fun. Actually, I believe our memories are mapped. None of them exists on its own, but rather refer to each other and interlinked with each other… our brain representing a big search engine, kind of biochemical based Google employing a random search. Try to refer to any memory you have: to make things easier, strong memory, or a memory of big importance for you.

An example. I have a memory of trying to climb up Everest.  It’s not the case of being megalomaniac, but rather accidentally. As long as I was there, you know.  I actually posted this memory here, on September 11th… , … nope, the date is just a coincidence. This memory opens up like a Russian matreshka doll: containing yet another one nested inside another etc. Thinking about that day brings back other memories: of finding a fossil near Milarepa’s cave, of fluorescent dog, of friendship, of moments while waiting for our friend we collected some stones and arranged them into a message “FREE TIBET”, of dying from thirst and cold. Whatever. This memory is also nested in others: of my long journey across Siberian plains, Mongolia, China, Nepal and India, of places I visited and people I met etc. OK, you have the picture.

Now imagine, you plant a fake memory inside your brain. Something completely out of sane mind and context, like planting a rare orchid somewhere in Siberian permafrost. If it will live, your brain would have to rewire it with some other facts, blending “reality” and “imagination”. So, what I’m interested in, is this “shadow zone”, border area in between, this vegetation between orchid and permafrost which my brain has to create to “index” this fake memory.

To make things even more interesting, I decided to experiment with planting fake memories in different contexts. For instance, I always wanted to visit Peru. So I thought  about planting a fake memory of this trip. But this task is way too grand, and the real trip would have too many details, so probably I wouldn’t succeed. Nevermind. I am writing a story at the moment. The best and easiest way to write is to write about something you know. It also gives the story some credibility, and makes it more captivating to read.

This story plot, to put it short,  goes partly in the future-past loop excluding present, partly in the parallel universes and most of it inside the black hole , with 3 main characters - creators of those parallel universes embedded without their acknowledgement in the mind of one character, whose consciousness is being badly split in 3 parts, meaning he is a schizophrenic (schizophrenia, actually literally means “split mind”, schizos phrenos in Greek, if I’m not mistaken). Moreover, these multiple “fake personalities” are being split in their own turn, forking further as the story develops… so it’s a kind of fractal consciousness in senses of being fractal and being fractured.

Writing such a story is not an easy task, as you can see. I am also trying to break logical chains of events in the process, so it reflects the schizophrenic plot of the  story and not boring to write. So I’m working hard on splitting my own consciousness, making it a bit schizophrenic and more colorful too. Sometimes I even have to write one chapter in different languages.

Coming back to this main character. To bridge the gap between known and unknown, I gave him my very good friend’s name and appearance. Just to add this lengthy discourse one more dimension, you actually, can read his posts here too, as he contributes his dreams and memories to Memorycemetery under name Ivan . So I wanted to take somebody I know (I think I know, of course), put him into a surrounding I know and can refer to, should I need to do so (say, downtown Bangkok by a canal, there I live now), and create a fictional episode from the plot. Thus I need to take a storyline and plant it in my memory as a memory of something real Ivan told me or we experienced together. Then I’d try to forget what was this memory about exactly, but keep 2 points of reference: Ivan and Bangkok, where he has never been to. Maybe I would have to do so few times, and probably try to do it while I asleep.

The memories or images I would have implanted in my mind I can actually dump later, what I really need is this “shadow zone” memories, those memories and links created not by me, but my brain in order to place Ivan in this picture. I know, it sounds rather confusing, but it’s possible. Once I travelled to Prague from Moscow by hitchhiking. It means that I’ve seen quite a lot of places, big and small; but mainly places I intended to see and places I didn’t, and often even didn’t know about their existence before; as I was taking there “with a flow”, merely by a chance: the driver would ask: where are you going?, and I will tell the name of the place; he often would tell me he is not going there, but going instead to that-and that place and can take me there. So there we go.

I had a map, and marked on that map my route on day-by-day basis and places I’ve been to. A couple of years ago and maybe around 7 or 8 years after that travel I checked the map and was shocked to discover that I actually have never been to Ostrava, though I had a very vivid memory of sitting on a bench of this city bus station early in the morning, bored to death, drinking local beer “Ostravar”, starving as I had nothing to eat, and looking at some dogs hanging around. I was absolutely sure I spent there good few hours, and even remember surrounding station boring industrial landscape, opening in the field in front of the station, in detail. Checking the map I recognized I didn’t even shave close to Ostrava… The line leading me to Prague didn’t go through it. What the heck! Of course, I could mess up the name, but I remember that bottle of Ostravar beer in my hand, thinking: “at least they have a nice beer here in this hole”, and generally some details: like name of the station painted in pale blue, and those benches with dates and names, name of Ostrava FC left by a local fan and even a message under in Czech, which I loosely translated “Ostrava sucks”… In the end of the day, according to my memory I really spent at that bus station  something like 3 hours.

OK, full stop with introductions and explanations here. Let’s get closer to the corpse, as one of my friends who worked in a morgue used to say. I thought that implement a traumatic memory could be a right thing to do (sorry, Ivan). So it will stay in my mind for sure and provide me with some interesting results.

So, as I kept in my mind this image of an orchid in permafrost, I typed in “beautiful traumatic memory” in Google, and hit “Enter” of this random beautiful traumatic memories’ generator.

It came up with a story about synaesthesia, which is, as the source puts it, “the involuntary ability to experience music as beautiful colors and luminous visual textures“. OK, from a lengthy, but interesting introduction I found out that this phenomenon “most often understood in certain Western scholarly discourses to be a neurological deficiency or “cross-wiring,” but which also frequently takes on the role of a savant-like gift, a mysterious power associated with autistic mathematical geniuses and creative artists.  Silent Jane’s synaesthesia story, however, is found to be crucially associated with her memories of being sexually abused as a child—memories that, as recent scholarly work on post-traumatic stress disorder theorizes, do not conform to typical causal, sequential, or temporal recollections, but exist rather as fragmented, sensorially-based visual and somatic flashbacks triggered primarily by the sonic: specific “colored timbres,” acoustic spaces, and the unique yet ubiquitous (television- and radio-based) sounds of one’s past“.

Perfect! Cross-wiring is exactly what I needed. So I read on. There were some actually nice passages there, as the descriprtion of this disorder from the first hands:

“For as long as I can remember, I have been able to hear colors. That is, when I listen to music, my mind’s eye is involuntarily flooded with immediate visual perceptions of intense and vivid colors that react directly to the sounds I am hearing.  For most of my life, I had no idea that this was an unusual way to experience music.  I assumed that everyone did this. 

When I discovered that French composer Olivier Messiaen had what he called a rare and strange “gift” for hearing colors (Messiaen 1956), I realized that this sensory phenomenon was not a so-called normal experience, but has instead been constructed in Western philosophical discourses as a cryptic neurological condition known as synaesthesia. In the strange, exoticized world of the synaesthete, colors can be heard, but also tasted, felt, smelled; sounds can be seen; tastes can be touched; textures can be heard (what will they say?).  There is little provision in Western thinking for these kinds of perceptions; they are the stuff of poetry, of metaphors and dreams.  People who live this way are thought to be “abnormal,” their brains “deficient”; and on their behalf, scientists should work diligently to discover “why.””

It also tells me why Messiaen music is so weird. Anyway, I can recommend everybody interested in the subject to follow this link (see above), and read the full article. It is fascinating and worth a look even if you are not. Meanwhile, as reading this article was not originally what I wanted to do, I skipped a bit of text to re-read it later to this moment. Here’s how I started my self-hypnosis session:

I would like to tell you a story.

As I do this, I would like you to attempt to listen to me with senses other than your hearing, especially your sense of smell, your oldest and “earliest” sense modality.  You can close your eyes, if you want to, or you can try to imagine the sound of my voice in a specific part of your body, a place other than your ears or the resonant bones of your face. 

Close your eyes.  Focus on the color of your eyelids, the color of the light that is being reflected from them, the color of your skin, the raw, bloody insides of your cheeks, the shadowed chasm of your mouth.  Let color be the way you imagine your entire body, from lips to toes—let your imagination draw a virtual map of your physical self; let your limbs become richly colored phantoms; let the skin encasing them take on a luminous pallor; let every sensation imbue your body with splatters of colored light.  Imagine all of your senses filtered through this one sensory concept of color. 

Travel now to your brain.  Try to imagine what its central core might look like, and what its colors might be.  Try to envision it as a sensual Q-sounding curve.  We’ll call this beautiful curve your hippocampus, and trace its delicate, sensual stripe around your graceful, almond-shaped amygdala, and give this entire region a name:  the Limbic System.  Think of the colors of your limbic system now, and try to taste them. 

Blah! I tested my limbic system and it blew my mind!

I recognized that I really can travel inside my mind and see everything in the detail. And then I started to plant there memories. I imagined some things, and stories transformed into sounds. I draw some pictures in my imagination and I could have a tactile feelings.

If you wonder what’s that, I’m not going to tell you. Give my beautiful traumatic fake memories some time to settle… One day I’ll come back to this post.

By the way, why don’t you try it yourself? Have you ever wondered how is your limbic system taste like?

Boris Kislitsin

Other posts by boris kislitsin