Amnesia

I don’t remember a lot of my childhood and adolescence. Much of it is a blur. This is frustrating, especially as compared to friends who retain vivid memories of their formative years. I have begun to realise that this inexactitude is also a vestibule for creative interpretation. Amnesia is an entrypoint into freedom. Perhaps, this may as well be true civilizationally. The more we deploy an attitude of exactitude toward our deep pasts and obsessively hunt for records that become aids in this exactitude, the more we are attached to the assumption of our totalised political, social, aesthetic correctness. We need for our pasts to be beautiful, just, golden and what not, in order to invent arguments for justice today. The glorification of some kings and the condemnation of fallen ones lend to our insecurities about the present. If our kings and courtiers were not fully correct, how do we claim our victory over history?

Not remembering a lot of the past, I’d say, is the way out. Yes, am saying: be somewhat ahistorical. Invent stories to fill the gaps between nearness and distance. I was recently told that there may be other (even greater) Greek epics than The Illiad and The Odyssey, they may be lost to history. Even these two that we take to be the greatest epics and testaments to the fineness of ancient western civilization, are not available in their complete, exact textual forms. We have built entire civilizational claims and aesthetic prides around these fragmented texts, by filling the gaps with imagination. Obsessions about historical exactitude thoroughly disrupt our collective and individual imaginative efforts toward building utopias of justice, goodness, and beauty.

I am an obsessive collector of traces of the past that collect on my phone. I routinely transfer even the most careless photo on my phone and file them thematically on my computer. Recently, I have decided to let go of some of this obsession, in aid of creating distance with myself. My smallest attempts in documenting the world don’t need to be filed meticulously. I want to be comfortable in gaps, trying to find meaning in void, brokenness, cracks in the walls of historicity. I hope, in the process, I will be a bit less historicised and a bit more imagined to myself.

[Imagined self. Mexico, 2013. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder.]