Memorycemetery

I have read somewhere a while ago about cells constituting a human body. Their life span lasts mostly from few seconds to months, depending on the kind. The longest ones live for around 7 years. It means that every 7 years we are completely regenerated: there is nothing left on physical plane from me living in 1999; not a single cell. I wonder how do we record our memories and how cells do pass recorded information from generation to generation… It looks like I already used to be 4 times, and about to finish my fifth cycle. Writing here is a sure way to back up myself in a case if something will go wrong, say, in a case of memory loss. So I decided to be honest, as ultimate memory loss anyway is just no more than 7 or 8 cycles away (keeping in mind what I’m a smoker, probably a half of that).

I spent most of my life trying to break out frames of convenience and certainty. My life was a constant escape. As I tried to live faster then my memories, I tried to run away from myself; cut off everything that hold ego together. To accept anything for given meant for me to accept self defeat. As I didn’t want to have compromises, I didn’t want to have anything in common with myself even a day ago. Head on I tried to hack into the future; no matter smash my head or break through I wanted to go as far as I could. I shed empty shells of my identity in process as a tree sheds leaves in the wind. Wind is a great allegory of time.

I didn’t see or rather didn’t care about danger of living like that then. Changing lives, names, places, occupations, friends, interests… you name it.

I lost myself. I don’t know anymore who I am, or who I was meant to be. It’s like a simultaneous chess game. Once I had an experience of it, playing with a chess grandmaster. He played 30 games the same time; walking up and down the lane of chess tables. I was just a somebody behind one of the boards. Now imagine yourself in his place, with no opponents on another side. You play this game on 30 boards with yourself; and these are different games with different sets of rules, sometimes rules you are not aware of. Some of them I managed to finish, some barely started.

I play chess on line sometimes. As I live in Thailand currently, every now and then when I play connection being lost. So there are games I never managed to finish; they have an open ending. In a way, if you lose connection with yourself, possibilities to be somebody else are also lost, or have “an open ending”. We still carry with us those “half life” personalities though. For example, I have never came across a computer program which would disappear from hard drive completely after being uninstalled: they leave records and empty keys in registry. With course of time this registry becomes clustered and computer slows down. I guess my life registry in soft drive of my consciousness is way too full of nonexistent records and empty keys of memory too. I do not even aware of their existence, some memories lead me to nowhere; as addresses of places where I lived before do not belong to me and do not mean anything anymore, I feel haunted by these shapes of my past. Those other me I was or could become are still with me; my head is full of words in different voices. If time is wind, for a while a could keep myself in the eye of my life’s hurricane; stay in a dead spot of inner peace in rapidly changing surroundings.

That was a time I lived in London; and there was a time in London I lived in a squat called “Sea cadets”, in Stoke Newington High Street. The building was designed to resist a major assault or a little siege, and served for a while as with a training ground for sea cadets. It really reminded me a street dog, defying biology mix husky and poodle: if you can imagine a mix of a prison and a ship, you’ll have the idea. It was a battleship indeed: a grim concrete building, it stood out it surroundings and even had a mast on the roof for putting up a flag. In our case it rather would be not Union Jack, but Skull and Bones though. Amongst people I lived with was Silvia; to cut the long intro short she and and another our housemate, Phil went to Palestine. It 2004 it was a very dangerous place to be. Tensions were high; Silvia and Phil with some other activists were what they call “a human shield”. They protected Palestinians from Israeli bullets and tanks. As dozens of Palestinian civilians dead behind the wall separating them from Israel and the world outside generally went unnoticed by self concerned Western world, a death of an European or American activist would make headlines. So soldiers tried not to shoot in the foreigners. This is what “human shield” is about. People were dying though, another friend in common caught a sniper’s bullet in his head. Phil stayed there, but Silvia came back. She told me a story about somebody she knew, who just came back at that time from Iraq.

When the “war” (probably “occupation” could be a better word) broke, her friend went there with friends, international peace activists, to protest against it and stop the slaughter. They wanted to help, to do something good for Iraqis.They wanted to bring with them some fun instead of bombs. There were some clowns and jugglers and performers between them, so they decided to make a little circus.

Circus is a great allegory of war – both are absurd. They couldn’t make it far, as they were kidnapped on the second day upon arrival by Iraqi rebels. Guerrillas couldn’t believe the story about the circus and thought they were spies, so kept all of them as hostages for few months.They treated them very well and provided with food and newspapers. Nobody threatened or tortured them. Rebels moved them around, so they changed few houses while captured. When they finally were freed, that girl didn’t want to go – she was by the time completely in love with one of the fighters. All what she could talk about is how the rebels were beautiful, brave and kind.

They call it Stockholm or Helsinki syndrome; I am not sure which one.

I wrote her story the same day I’ve heard it; I read it again today by an accident. Let’s say there was a valid registry in my computer memory where in my original was an empty key. I completely forgot about this story; probably it was carried away by one of my personalities and left behind. Anyway, a great Russian poet Sergei Esenin said in one of his poems: большое видится на расстоянии, which could be loosely translated in English as “the scale of something could be seen only from a distance”. Be it a distance of time or space, I see things differently now. I see something I didn’t grasp then: I also have this Scandinavian city syndrome. I am captured by my own past. I long to be a person I was, not a person I would become. I am a hostage in prison of days and there is no escape, nor there’s a ransom for my head. Silvia’s friend could run away on few occasions, but she didn’t. I can’t even run – you can’t run away from yourself. All I can do is to carry on. I’m lost in the endless days shaped one after another. I swim in my time like in ocean, and there is no ground in sight. What keeps me afloat is my life jacket of hope. There are no worries though. Life is a journey where what important is not destination (Sansara – Nirvana transit), we all will end up at the same point of disembarkment. What important is a journey.

Boris Kislitsin

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