thoughtcurry

[thoughtcurry]

Mnemosyne

Flavours: memory, social media, reinvention Serves: More than one. Recommended discussion with others. Read Time: 4 minutes

Anyone who knows me well can vouch for the fact that I have a terrible memory. I can never remember roads, locations of shops, phone numbers or even explicit events someone has told me about. Quizzically, I am great with names. 

Thankfully, I was born at the turn of the 21st century and blessed with the existence of GPS, online payment receipts and records of conversations if they happen over text or on call. For other grievances too, technology has given me a helping hand. Though I’m not one of those people who can just remember somebody’s birthday (like my mother), I have been keeping track of my friends’ and family’s birthdays for about 3 years now. First in a physical diary and now on my online calendar. And of course, there are pictures. Pictures for everything. I have seen a lot of the world in my very short life, but I find it difficult to recall names of restaurants, monuments or cities I have been to. But so far I have never pulled up a specific picture to remind myself of these details. I do, however, revisit pictures of things I cannot forget. Hundreds of experiences burned into my memory with only a vague idea of where and when they took place - an afternoon lunch in a little hut in Sri Lanka, a tea break at a military outpost in the Arunachal mountains, standing on the cobbled floor of the town where Mozart died. The places where I store these on the internet do not discriminate between such things. Increasingly so, I will stumble upon a “4 years ago, on this day” and almost always a “This week last year.” When places that others don’t have access to show me this, I indulge myself. I share it with the relevant people with a nostalgic or wry comment. (”Why did no one ever tell me to stop pouting in pictures?”) On the other hand, when places that everybody has access to bring it up, I am slightly mortified. I know in reality that nobody cares about what I posted 3 years ago, why I posted it, what I thought about it that time or why it was important to me. But I care. Because I am no longer that person and I don’t want be remembered as her.  One of my absolute favourite channels on Youtube is Ted-Ed, and this series by them is especially fascinating to me. It serves as a reminder that for most of civilization, ordinary people kept no record of their existence. They just existed. We can only guess how they might have lived their days, but we can never know their intimate thoughts and relationships. We can know them as a people, not a person.  Cut to today, where I can find the entire history of someone with some time and a little effort. Until recently, when I used to post anything on social media, I only cared about how I was being seen and not how I was being remembered. But the two are an intersection - how I am seen today is how I will be remembered tomorrow. I don’t know how if I can make peace with that yet.  The internet is forever. She is a Goddess - vast and all-consuming but also uncompromising and almost ruthless about our own record of ourselves. In submitting to her I am ensured my own eternity, but I must subject myself to constantly being visited by the shadows of my past. 

Then I remember two things. Firstly, I am content with the spots and blotches on my memory. As long as I can remember the feeling of standing on the cobblestones, why do I care about the name of the town or when I went there and what I looked like that day? And secondly, that my memory is my own to keep, no matter how terrible.

A quote from Sylvia Plath’s Unabridged Journals that has got me thinking a lot recently: “I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?” -x- I am currently on a break from social media and trying to explore my experience with and without it. This blog is a result of that exploration. More to come in the coming weeks. If you liked this post, please consider sharing it with your friends (whatsapp). You can leave feedback (anonymously as well) for this work here or here. Thank you for reading! Happy Sunday!

[thoughtcurry]

Amazing thought about our existence. Noone knows from what part of scheme we come from and universe is soo vast most of us cant we imagine it. So witness the wonders as much as you can till your last breath. RIP

RIP.

[thoughtcurry]

The Universal Truth

Flavours: existentialism, mortality,  Serves: single use. intended for one person. read time: 6 minutes

I first learnt about the concept of a Universal Truth not in philosophy or physics class, but in 6th grade English. “A Universal Truth is always in the simple present tense.” To demonstrate it, my teacher gave us a list of examples. The Earth revolves around the Sun. Five times two is ten. Water is tasteless. Universal truths are different from facts in the sense that they are, obviously literally, universal. In no situation can we dispute their implication. The Earth revolves around the Sun - this is true both in India or Brazil. But we didn’t always consider this to be the case. Our very recent ancestors did believe that the opposite was a Universal Truth, and anyone who claimed otherwise was a threat to the beliefs that had been built around it. So, what may be a Universal Truth at this point in time may not be considered one in the future. Even fundamental laws of physics are constantly being challenged and rewritten as we discover how little we know about this vast universe in which we exist. One fundamental truth, however, seems to have persisted time and space, both scientifically and culturally: Humans are mortal.

This truth had never much bothered me. I didn’t deal with the death of a close relative or friend during my childhood or most of my young adult life (which I’m grateful for). Us 90s and 00s kids were fortunate enough to not witness a full blown war and grew up in a time when mass poverty in our country was in steady decline. Death at such a scale was unthinkable. But 2020, with it’s constant blaring signals of death have forced me to confront it rather unpleasantly. It reminds me of when I was younger and my mother would shove dal chawal down my throat when I refused to complete my meals. I know it’s important for my growth, but it’s still difficult to swallow. I found myself being shaken to the fragility of human life that I had never considered before. And it was terrifying! I became existential. I started to question the very fabric of the reality that I was living in. It was as if a cosmic rug had been pulled from under my feet and I had nowhere else to land my feet, like a very bad game of the floor is lava. (The floor is a constant reminder that you could die and everything else is just an illusion.) I gave up trying to do pretty much anything and exercised escapism on a whole different level. Showering seemed like the most tedious thing in the world. When I was in bed I didn’t feel like getting out, when I was up I didn’t want to go to sleep. I oscillated between numbing my emotions or releasing them all at once, neither of which was enjoyable. But enough was enough, I still had dreams that I wanted to go after and I knew time was running out before I could realistically work towards them. Something had to change. Somehow I found myself rewatching The Good Place. The premise of the show is that a woman finds herself in “heaven” after her death, but she isn’t supposed to be there. Through the characters’ many adventures in the afterlife, Mike Schur’s world comforted me about my real life. It made me realize that even the most exemplary humans to ever exist had flaws, and the most deplorable might have a chance at redemption. This video by Kurzegesagt also helped me with my premature existential crisis. It argues: “You only get one shot at life, which is scary. But it also sets you free. If the universe ends in heat death, every humiliation you suffered will be forgotten. Every mistake you made will not matter in the end. Every bad thing you did will be voided. If our life is all we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to decide what it’s purpose is.” Optimistic Nihilism seems to be just the philosophy that I needed to adopt to survive this chaotic time.    We don’t know what happens after we die. But we do know what we are doing now can change the course of humanity. Or maybe just one life (our own). The point is that we get to decide which of those two or anything in between matters. And truthfully, that seems like it’s enough.     -x- Note: If you only take one thing away from this article let it be this: watch The Good Place! It’s a brilliant show which makes you think about death, life, ethics, philosophy, morality and so much more while still being genuinely funny and charming. I was recommended the show by a close friend and only see it fit to recommend it to others. It changed my life a little and hope it does the same for you. -x-  If you liked this post, please consider sharing it with your friends (Whatsapp). You can leave feedback (anonymously as well) for this work here or here. Thank you for reading! Happy Sunday!