Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But it would be preemptive to state that memory is a storage room. It is not a tool for being able to think, it is thinking, before thinking. It is impossible to separate it from what it remembers. I admit that memory resurrects the dead, but they remain within their world, not mine.
But memory is the glue that keeps the universe together: although immaterial, it makes’ being’ possible, it is being. If an idea did not remember to think, it wouldn’t ‘be’. If a chair was not there, it would not be tomorrow. If I did not remember that I am, I will not be. We can also say that the universe is itself the glue that keeps it going. Because it remembers itself, it exists. Because it exists, it remembers.
Memory is intelligent. It is a knowledge seated neither in the senses, nor in the spirit, but in the collective memory. It is communal, inspite of being deeply personal. Involved with the self, though autonomous, it is always at war with death.
Reason and memory move together, the night-time and memory mediate each other. Avaricious, whimsical, they release things bit by bit. Memory sews together events that hadn’t previously met. It reshuffles the past and made me aware that it is doing so. Memory is in my being and it reaches out, sometimes missing the connection with reality, its neighbour, its substance.
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