 |
| Gustave Caillebotte |
1. Remembering and imagining
The question of how to distinguish between remembering and imagining is importantly ambiguous. On the one hand, we sometimes remember but do so in a way that is in some sense inadequate; in such cases, we naturally say that we are “only imagining”. The question can thus be taken to concern the distinction between cases in which the subject remembers successfully and cases in which he remembers unsuccessfully.
Excerpt from Memory / Remembering and imagining, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"Damned nonsense," he muttered to himself and pulled out a band with small brown beads that he began to finger.
"Excuse me?" asked the man next to him.
"Nothing."
It became quiet again, aside from the engine and the gravel road's pebbles scattering in all directions. He stroked over the wine-red fabric and realized he wouldn't be able to do this. Felicia had stayed; he had asked her to stay home. Deep pain was something he did not share with anyone. He had thought Rasmus and Lisa would contribute something, a rekindling. Instead, the weight felt a hundred times worse. It was a mockery of his assurance to himself that it was possible to reconcile then and now. All those years at the collective had become a chain for him. If it were possible to just forget, he would have done it, but the cells still remembered. A tremendous weight making him melancholy, heavy. It was like gravel in the brain. The man next to him was dressed in a simple but elegant black suit. He preferred to surround himself with such men even though he himself stubbornly clung to his hippie-inspired but expensive clothes. He felt the ash in his mouth these days. It rose from his throat. You can fool everyone except your own body. Eventually, the car stopped at a small stone church. The man driving jumped out, and Arvid slowly got out. It had started to rain, but he didn't care. He cast a glance at the large black car and over the empty spots where no cars were parked except theirs. There was something crawling in the other man's manner, Arvid thought. Just like the black car, he liked it and at the same time, he didn't. "What am I doing wrong?" he thought as they started walking along the little church path up towards the graveyard.
"What weather," commented the man next to him. Arvid muttered irritably. Be quiet, he would have wanted to say. Be quiet and leave me alone. When they arrived at the graves, he decided.
"Erik..."
"Yes?"
"I would need to be alone. You see where I am. Could you not wait outside?"
"Of course," he answered quickly and remained at the gates while Arvid walked in among the stones. He walked past mossy graves whose names could no longer be seen. Large and small. The path was raked and rustled softly as he searched for the place for the new graves. The church was old, like all country churches. Eventually, he realized he had come to the wrong place. Here lay Stina Jönsson, who apparently seemed to have been 97 years old. Completely wrong... He let out a frustrated sound and walked behind the grave and over to some aspens growing in a cluster. They seemed well, he couldn't help but think they sucked up blood and mucus from corpses. That's why they were doing so well. A macabre place, he thought, and breathed heavily. Finally, he found the grave. Here by the wall were some new graves with small modest stones. The urge to smoke increased but he had decided to refrain. The stone was brand new and the name was clearly visible, no moss had yet grown fast. The heart pounded. There were flowers on the grave so someone must have remembered it. Or was it the caretaker who placed these there for the fee he paid every month? He still didn't know what would happen if he stopped paying. Would they remove the stone and evict what remained in an unknown mass grave? Or would the stone be allowed to stand here for hundreds of years until the name could no longer be seen? He had tried to talk to the financial manager about it when he agreed to pay for the maintenance of the stone.
"You know, we wouldn't have room for all the new ones if we didn't remove some," replied the thin man. He had immediately disliked him. There was something about church staff that made him shudder. Maybe it was because they were always so interested in money? Or so self-righteous?
The man had placed a hand on him, and Arvid had taken a step back.
"We are all going to walk that path, there wouldn't be space for the living," the man continued. But why is there only space for those who pay? he had wanted to ask but hadn't said anything.
He had seen the priest to ask something and had been annoyed by the priest's physique. Somehow, it felt like a commercial arrangement, rather than something sacred. I'm paying for your fat, Arvid had thought. From dust you came... What nonsense. I came from slime and blood, he thought, trying to connect the gravestone with the person lying beneath. There's nothing that connects the two, he thought gloomily. He had saved a cell sample with spinal cord cells and blood taken at the hospital. It had been quite difficult to convince the hospital staff, but he succeeded by claiming he was the closest relative. What he would do with it, he had no idea... a confused thought that it was the last remaining part, a living remnant. The priest couldn't bury everything as long as there were living cells above ground. He had paid for it to be kept in storage. It was the only living remnant left. What now it would serve. A grayness over the mind's cameras and smells. The rain fell, and his deep red velvet jacket got soaking wet. He stood for a while trying to understand before he froze and walked towards the church. Instead of entering, he walked around the building. Ancient stone. Damn, how heavy all this was, he thought. All these remains weigh us down, just like my memories. He stood for a while in front of the church door, considering for a long time whether to enter while looking at the church door. But no, again that physical resistance to everything church-related. Maybe it was because it represented the weight he himself carried. All that damn ballast that wasn't there when he was younger. He couldn't bring himself to enter that stone-smelling place. There was a disorder and veiled clarity. Would it be possible to give away everything and be free from all this weight? If it would work, he had never hesitated. But instead of deciding, he stood there outside the church door, shivering until he started coughing and blew his nose in a napkin.
"The past matters not at all to me," he whispered at the church door, standing in the rain. But the magical rite seemed not to work. He threw all his memories, all these years, against the church in an attempt to get rid of them. The rain began to pour more heavily, and he sneezed several times. There was some superstition about sneezing at church gates, he thought and smiled. Instead of relief, he felt even more burdened. To avoid getting sick, he turned around and began walking along the path lined with graves. When he reached the exit, Erik stood with his collar up, smoking under a little roof. Arvid stood next to him, reading the notices next to the man. A walk in the Lord's acres... a recurring walk in the beautiful hills around Heby Church... welcome to church coffee and a lecture about Linnaeus's Gottsunda with a biologist at Uppsala University. Erik stubbed out the cigarette and glanced at Arvid. Some pensioners came straggling by, then he decided it was time to leave. They passed the old people, and Arvid quickly went to the car and threw himself into the seat. As they drove off through the wooded hills and along the roads where the lilacs stood so densely that they hit the car, he felt nothing but a dull sense of confusion. Something that could no longer be sorted out, tangles and skeins that had gone deeper into the head over the years. He couldn't live with the confusion. With a thought, he decided to make one last attempt to escape from it. He didn't know what he would do if he failed.
The black car continued down the small country road while the rain fell. As the rain gathered and became even more powerful, he tried to collect his thoughts. But it was like trying to catch clouds. Emotions bloomed and filled every nook of his head. Now it was Monika who wandered around in his head. An obsession that often plagued him. But a moment later, the image of her collapsed into nothing and was replaced by Felicia's disappointed face. There she stood outside their house, telling him to get lost before she hit him. Thoughts whirled around like sparks.
He was grateful for the silence in the car. Every time Erik tried to say something, he grunted sourly in response. The trees were losing their leaves. A beautiful and muddy day out at the house in Uppland, he thought. A gray reality, the water ran in streams. He wished that moisture could enter his head and extinguish all the inflamed fires. It helped, the thought of the moisture and the fog. When they got out on the highways, he could think so clearly that he found it comical with Erik's fine clothes.
"We are going to the house of the dead," he had told the man when he asked if he could take him out in Uppland. He had never seen Erik so dressed up before. Black suit and all, the man showed respect. Arvid's red shirt of an expensive brand was wet. It smelled distinctly of wool in the car.
Water masses outside the car streamed through the stubbled fields.
"Turn off here," he suddenly said with a hiss.
"Where?"
"There, to Djurgården. Turn off."
2. Traumatic memories
With the emergence of new techniques for altering the functioning of memory systems—for example, retrieval of a stored memory results in a period of reconsolidation during which the retrieved memory is labile and susceptible to modification, potentially allowing interventions to alter traumatic memories (Spiers & Bendor 2014)—ethical questions concerning various forms of memory modification have become more pressing (Erler 2011; Hui & Fisher 2015; N. Levy 2012; Liao & Wasserman 2007).
Excerpt from Memory/ The ethics of memory modification and enhancement, SEP.
"Mom!" She screams in the dark as she runs across the field while the anxiety of being alone is too strong for her to bear. She cries while she is ashamed of it, and snot and tears mix as they run down her face. Mud splashes up over her shoes. A truck swerves past in front. She catches sight of rows of soldiers sitting on the flatbed. She looks up. They resemble shadows with weapons between their legs. The military installation's steel gates open and let out the truck; she sees it disappear down the mountain road. The darkness is torn apart now and then by the shots of anti-aircraft fire.
"Where are you!" She screams into the night and cries uncontrollably. The sky lights up in pink-red explosions that turn night into a twisted red day for a moment. She flinches as flames burst from an anti-aircraft gun firing from a truck further away. People in uniforms hurry past, at first, no one notices her. Their high boots move quickly, quickly over the mud. But then a woman in a blue uniform stops and looks at her. The others continue away.
"Where are you?" she sobs and wipes her face with her hands. She can barely see through the tears, and when a hand is placed on her shoulder, she jumps, crouches, and tries to escape. The woman looks worriedly at her.
"Take it easy, I'm not going to hit you," says the woman. "You seem lost." When Elena says nothing but just stares scared up at her, she adds, "My name is Maria," and bends down so they are at eye level.
"Where is she?" Elena responds and stares at the woman.
"Who? This is a military installation. Children shouldn't be running around here. Who are you looking for?"
A memory flashes by, becomes stronger until nothing but horror remains.
"Mom," mutters Elena and looks around at the soldiers stomping around on the large open mud field, trying to stay out of the way of trucks and armored vehicles slowly chugging through the muck. Far too many have gathered here in far too short a time since the army fell back from the front.
The woman shakes her head. "What did you say?"
"She's dead," mutters Elena again as the atrocity creeps over her. That which defies all her imagination and leaves her with such anxiety that for a short while she cannot breathe. Despite the darkness, the woman finally sees the stains on her red skirt, which is splattered with large amounts of blood.
"Are you hurt?" the woman asks quickly.
Elena shakes her head while she cannot speak. All she sees in front of her is her mother's blown-off legs where blood poured over her while she screamed and screamed.
"No," she says, shaking her head as the shock settles over her like a lid.
"Who brought you here?"
"Dad."
"I will help you find whoever it is. But come with me, it's dangerous out here."
Maria takes Elena's hand in a firm grip. They walk across the mud field, dodging not to be run over by a mobile ramp chewing through the base's muddy yard.
"Isn't there someone you know here?" The woman says again and looks at her.
"Dad," she finally responds. The woman looks encouragingly at her. "Who is dad then?"
She says his name and sniffs. The reaction does not wait on itself. Maria stops, turns around, and looks at her as she hadn't seen her before. Carefully this time, with wide eyes. Then she mutters a curse and grips Elena even tighter in her hand. They run towards a concrete-like building across the base.
That's when it happens, quickly but slowly as if it were choreographed events. Elena gasps in fear as the lights and then the roar from the anti-aircraft fire from the black gun towers fire not far from where they stand. A screeching sound of fighter jets taking off and accelerating too quickly and too close to the ground. Both the woman and Elena cover their ears. The woman throws a panicked look at the sky, Elena only glimpses the bombers as black shadows when they are caught by the searchlights before the woman grips her so hard it hurts against the concrete wall, holding her in her arms so that the woman ends up between Elena and the concrete.
"Hold on to me!" the woman hisses before the world explodes.
It's not like the other explosions that have so far been far away, but this one is much closer, it's the loudest sound she's heard. In the pressure wave that follows, she is just soft tissues pressed against the concrete wall, directly into the woman protecting her with her own body against the hard concrete wall. She and the woman remain upright against the concrete for a few seconds before the pressure wave subsides and they both collapse in the muck.
For a while, she just lies there and breathes in spurts while staring up at the sky where an incredible fireworks display takes place as the fighter jets shoot down first one and then another bomber in red and purple explosions in the night sky. But she hears nothing, absolutely nothing other than a loud ringing in her ears and a cotton-like silence. It's only after a while she discovers that she is lying on the woman named Maria. She rolls away and sees her lying with her back down, her face turned towards the mud. Elena gets scared that she will suffocate in the muck and with a tremendous effort, she stands up on her knees and turns her over.
3. Personal identity
Locke ([1689] 1998)—who was perhaps anticipated in this by Spinoza (Lin 2005)—discussed the idea that what makes a person at a given time count as the same person as a person at an earlier time is that he remembers the earlier person’s experiences. This memory theory of personal identity has been much discussed since Locke (Mathews, Bok, & Rabins 2009), and there are well-known substantive and methodological problems for it.
Excerpt from Memory / Personal identity, SEP
"So there you are!" the sharp voice quickly pulls me out of the mood. I squint to retain the feeling.
I open one eye.
"I feel terrible today, bad."
"I also feel lousy today," she says and wipes away some sweat. She is wearing a colorful drape. I think she looks like the hippie icon Talitha Getty.
"Don't talk about it."
"You will feel better if you eat something. A glass of juice and a sandwich help. Come and have breakfast."
"It's the middle of the day," I protest.
Felicia sits on the couch. I also sit and feel dizzy.
"Arvid has made breakfast. There's all sorts to choose from. My husband is good at making things. You feel better when you eat," she pleads. "Since I got up, I've mostly been eating. Yes, there are even brown beans with eggs."
"I feel terrible," I say, just to really emphasize how bad I feel.
"Awful," she agrees. Suddenly, I remember something.
"Wasn't Lisa down early this morning? I woke up because she went downstairs and thought I heard Arvid's voice."
She looks uncertainly at me for a second.
"You'll have to ask him about that, I have no idea."
I quickly stand up and sway as my blood pressure drops. The air folds from my head.
"You look sick."
Felicia hurries over and supports me by the back.
"Thank you," I say. "Sorry to ask, but why are you so kind to me?"
She is silent for a while.
"You mean a great deal to Arvid, and someone who is so important to him is also important to me."
That sounds rational, I think, and groan. "He means a lot to me too, I just wondered..."
"I thought so," she says and smiles encouragingly. "In the sunshine, you will soon feel better."
In the kitchen, I pour tea and take a baguette with a note next to it. It says "Help yourself" on it. The sandwich seems to contain goat cheese. The sunlight stings my eyes as I come out. The headache makes me close my eyes.
"Did you finally drag yourself up?"
Arvid squints at me and shouts as I approach the furniture. I sit on the warm outdoor chair. He looks terrible today. Twenty years older. Lisa sits next to him, eating a triangle-shaped sandwich with some mushy content.
"What did you do last night? It looks like you crawled through a thicket."
That makes him grin even more, then he continues to eat brown beans and boiled eggs. We sit in silence in the scorching sunshine. Felicia comes walking with a grapefruit in her hand.
"I must go to the sea. This is terrible," she says, peeling the grapefruit. My brain feels like a sea of wine. I chew on the sandwich without tasting anything. Felicia grabs the milk pitcher standing in the sun.
"I love sun-warmed milk," she says, getting milk on her lip. Arvid makes a face at me, and I kick off my bathing shoes and feel the grass against my skin.
"We should absolutely go to the sea," Felicia decides, looking at Arvid. He grins like a clown and opens his mouth. I glimpse mashed beans inside and need to vomit. I quickly stand up and look away towards the stone wall.
"I'm not interested." I say, looking down at the table. "But go ahead, it'll be fun."
"But come along..." Arvid says tiredly.
"No, I just need to rest in the house."
"Suit yourself," Arvid says with a sour face and drinks steaming black coffee.
After I've cleared a lot of dishes in the kitchen, I go out again. I follow the path that leads behind the house and go out over the large lawn. We used to have crops here. A sprinkler is a bit away, ensuring the lawn is green. At the end of the property stands the stone wall. I jump up on it as I used to do in years past when I wanted to be alone. The flat stones move considerately. The sun is scorching up here, on the crest of a hill. Below the wall burnt red clover and weeds. Beyond them lie the cereal fields and the forest. The heated stones burn through the pants. The crickets sing loudly in the hill below. In such heat, I always used to smoke. I get such a craving for it and shake out the last cigarette and light it. The taste of tar and burnt earth filters through the mouth with each breath. The heat and the cigarette travel through the body like calm shocks in me. When I ash it, I am harmonious. A lizard stares at me from a crevice between some stones. I stare back. The heat makes me gasp with pleasure. A wind rustles the increasingly dry leaves from the trees behind. The heat makes the blood boil, and I sink into a comfortable fatigue.
Kommentarer