Memorycemetery

When the Emperor Charlemagne came into the country of the East Saxons and asked them whom they worshipped they replied, “Krodo is our god;” to which the Emperor replied “Krodo is all the same as Kroten-duvel!” “And he made them pay bitterly by the sword and the rope for the crime of calling God, according to their language, by a name different from that which he used; for he put many thousands of them to death, like King Olof of Norway, to show that his faith was one of meekness and mercy.

A friend of mine just came from Cambodia, he was talking in great lengths about fields of death there, heritage of khmer rouges, or Red Khmers. In a span of 20 years something like a quarter of population was wiped out. A field of death is a grave, there hundreds or thousands of people sometimes put together, by hands or with a help of bulldozer. It reminded me unexpectedly a movie I saw recently, Get Smart, in which Maxwell Smart, who is a secret agent for the US agency called CONTROL (whose nemesis organization is called KAOS - which they say like the word ‘chaos’), says: “We have to shoot and kill and destroy. We represent everything good and wholesome in the world.”

History repeats itself, otherwise it wouldn’t be called history.

I talked to a sheikh of Nimatullahi sufi order once about human psychology and evolution: his idea (if I remember it correctly) was that Humankind develops technology at neck breaking speed, much faster than our consciousness, and faster than we evolutionary can develop to comprehend and control the technology we possess.  Tools are getting more advanced, and weapons getting more dangerous.

That’s true: as the world evolves, we have to face all sorts of threats unheard of before, from religious terrorism to global warming. Moreover, we face more risks on a daily basis: some of them we are aware of, such as crossing a busy street, some not, be it an airplane crashing into your house while you are asleep or exposition to electromagnetic radiation from multiplicating devices: mobile phones, wi fi’s, et cetera et cetera et cetera. Our old good 4 kilos of brain contained in our skull compartment can’t handle it. He had a point there, but I disagree for 2 reasons:

1) some scientists say our brain being the most complex Nature created within Solar system (quoting Michio Kaku). It has billions neurons and trillions connections. Thinking about it makes me wonder. If God doesn’t play dice, as A. Einstein said, our brain does. Recalling same facts brings me back different memory each time; they are never the same. I guess it is because memory travels by one of those trillion circuits, and even switching them on the way. It is like you will have a trillion words to describe the same thing or trillion options on how you can get home. I guess there’s a decision making hierarchy in our operative system: though there are no trillion options for me to let’s say, get cigarettes if I want to smoke and I’m at home, but under 10 (we are talking about reasonable ways, as I’m not going to travel across the globe if I have to just cross the road to get a pack of cigarettes). But I always choose the same one.

Now, when I think about my last trip across the road to get one (actually I should be going again soon), I come up with different descriptions each time:

 a) on my way there I saw that fat tom cat sleeping on the roof of a car. It looked so peaceful that even if I know this cat is a super-bully and megaalphaprimemaletopcatoftheblockmegalomaniac picking up fight with my cat on a regular basis, I stroke it’s had;

 b) before I went there actually I was staying on the balcony, and I saw a big rat nearby rubbish by that shop, I wandered then if a rat cat eat tobacco;

c) there was a beautiful red hint in the sky I couldn’t come up with a name for. I thought then about some oil paints. I do paint myself, but probably can come up with 5 or 6 names for blue. I remembered another artist I met though in a local Hackney pub called “Dolphin”, who boasted that he can distinguish and name probably 80 hues and hints, we started off from that; for each new 10 he’d get a pint of bitter from me. He stopped somewhere after 30 though, but still that was an amazing record;

 d) I thought actually if I should be a pack or decent fags, as I want to quit smoking, or just few local made ones, called “Wonder”. I wondered if I’ll have my lung cancer faster as the result, and why they are called wonder?;

e) the shopkeeper was wearing funny stripped trousers;

 f) at last I could remember how to ask for a blue pack in Thai, “Fa”, meaning sky. Rain is “namfa”; that is skywater. A friend of mine came to visit me here a while ago, his wife has Korean surname, Nam. So every time she’d ask for water she had just to mention her name;

g) yes, I nearly forgot to get some juice on my way back;

 h) a girl playing in the street with an over-sized plastic dragon, 2 of 3 its heads chopped off, probably by her brother, swaying his sword nearby in a Ultraman mask… I could carry on like this until I’ll run out from the letters of alphabet, and probably should, but nevermind. I guess it’s enough. Same thing happens when I’m trying to recall any of my memories, they always come back different, in different shapes, forms and colors. That’s what this most complex object within our Solar system can produce; each time we learn a new way to observe the world, space changes structure. There are rather no biological limitations, but self-imposed.

2) I think the idea of what we can have an absolute control over anything is an illusion, and I don’t think I should really go into lengthy explanations here.  It’s rather an axiom for me, and it doesn’t require proof.

I don’t want to build an argument neither on religious crusades nor on mass atrocities. What I think is: Humankind is still in its childhood. I’ve done some naughty and cruel things when I was a child myself. Catching flies, ripping off their wings, keeping them in a matchbox giving them sugar and trying to train them for my pocket circus; collecting bugs, splitting kerosene other and putting them on fire; catching yet more flies for conducting research: dropping them in a glass with acid solution keeping the track of number and time it takes to dissolve; having fun tiing some cans to my cats’ tail and making it run; bunging my friends and parents heads with a plastic hammer…

I do not do these things now, but being a grown up with a little son, I feel pity sometimes to our cat, watching him playing with it. Cat meaows; history repeats itself; memory never does.

Boris Kislitsin

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