Another Fence Around Our Minds

Where Dragonflies Sleep starts my memory in so many agreeable directions, it would take hours to account for them all, if I ever came to the end. This brings to mind a question: is my memory infinite? Is it even possible to know? And what of ancestral memory, cultural memory, bodily memory, and the collective memory of our kind? And isn’t instinct a form of memory which, having existed for so long, doesn’t require active recognition or engagement to operate? So that living itself becomes a habit — the one thing, that if we forget to do, we do anyway, just as we have been doing, and expect to go on doing, until the end. Then of course, too, there is our definition of living. Because if we can forget we are living, are we really living at all? Or are we just keeping track of the time? In the 1937 film Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra and starring Ronald Colman, the character, Chang, says, Age is a limit we impose upon ourselves. You know, each time you Westerners celebrate your birthday, you build another fence around your minds. Interesting.

[ 2022 ]