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. Continue reading ‘History repeats itself; memory never does’
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I came across an article called “The culture of memory” a couple of weeks ago: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.html A quote from there:
…Any earlier than about 3.5 years is, for most of us, a blank slate. We all have what Freud first called “childhood amnesia”–an inability to remember our earliest childhood. Ask a Maori New Zealander about his or her earliest memory, though, and you might find that the childhood amnesia ended a bit sooner. A Maori’s first memory might be of attending a relative’s funeral at 2.5 years old. A Korean adult, on the other hand, might not remember anything before age 4. Memory varies widely from person to person. Researchers have also found that the average age of first memories varies up to two years between different cultures. “We think that this is a function of the meaning of memory within a particular cultural system,” says Michelle Leichtman, PhD, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire who studies childhood memory. People who grow up in societies that focus on individual personal history, like the United States, or ones that focus on personal family history, like the Maori, will have different–and often earlier–childhood memories than people who grow up in cultures that, like many Asian cultures, value interdependence rather than personal autonomy…on average, Asian adults’ first memories were later than Caucasians’ (57 months as compared with 42 months). Maori adults’ memories reached even further back, to 32 months on average.
So, what would be my first memory? Here’s another one. I guess I was around four. I remember I was sick. My mother took me to hospital by sleds. I was completely covered in blankets and my head wrapped in my grandma’s shawl. On the way back from hospital my mother bought me a car to play with. I built for this car a track and ramp from my books. I was so excited playing with them I pissed in my knickers. I was afraid my mother would blame for this, so I went up to the radiator of central heating. It was mounted by the window, so I climbed on my little stool and pressed my knickers against it. It was in the winter, so the radiator was quite hot. I stood like this for a while, watching snow falling and people making their way on the icy pavements, and cars stuck in the snow… until my knickers got dry.
What I wanted to say, it took me about 20 minutes or so… watching snow. It was so beautiful to see its falling and everybody in the street didn’t seem to pay any attention to it… Continue reading ‘Culture, memory and snow’
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About twenty years ago, I was a naughty boy and a little bossy. I fought with other boys almost every day and sometimes I fought with my elder sister. I was five or six years old when I saw Superman on T.V the first time. It seemed he could do everything, so he became my idol. My dream was to be a Superman.
Finally I made up my mind to be Superman. So I called up all of my friends and said in front of my house, “Is there any body that can jump from that second floor?” A silence flew through my friends. I said, “All right, all of you are like chickens, but I can do it”. They said “Are you sure?” I said “Sure! And if I do it, I’ll get all the marbles that you have, but if I fail, you will get all of my marbles. Good deal?” They said, “O.K” So I went up to the second floor with the Superman costume, stood at the edge of the floor for a few seconds, and took a deep breath. I felt cold because I was almost naked. But what a brave boy! I jumped with my arms extended like Superman. During the flight, though it was just a second, I could see every eye of my friends get wider.
“CRASH!” I fell down on the ground. And I was knocked out for just a moment.
When I opened my eyes slowly I could see my mom’s nose. I had to go to the hospital with my mom because a part of my tongue was cut in the crash. But I got the marbles later and I became the leader in my group of friends.
Seung-Hyun Park
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I think that memories travel through our mind in loops, just like celestial bodies traverse the Universe. Probably I can even predict when some of them will return. Some, even as I write, are crossing the point of no return and are being sucked in black holes of my consciousness. They can not disappear: it is in contradiction with laws of physics and common sense. So there are most of my hours, days, weeks and years had gone? Why memory is so random?
Scientific data shows that Matter accounts only for 10% of the total mass of the known Universe. 90% is Dark Matter, “dark matter” in the direct sense, as we know nothing about It. I guess 99,99999999999999999999999999…% of my memory is also Dark Matter.
Only one memory is omnipresent: the everlasting memory of now.
Memories of my past just cycle in my mind in orbits and change their traectories attracted by owerhelming gravity pool of our imagination. Imagination as a factor of chaos creates.
For a change, let’s see memory loops in the different perspective. Loop memories.
Memory loop 1. (Rain loop) Continue reading ‘Memory dark matters and loops’
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