My Museum of Memories

Memory is a funny thing. Certain things we retain, and others we forget. Mark Gungor compares men's brains to boxes and women's to ball of wire. See the video on Youtube.  BBC's Sherlock has a "Mind Palace" which is like some extra deep place he'll go to retrieve information stored there to solve cases.

I've decided that my mind is like a museum. It's not a particularly well-ordered and logically laid out one either. Additionally, it's got a lot of cluttered rooms and a few with almost nothing in them. My museum contains little movie clips I play over and over, snapshots of the past, and other artifacts of memory. Some memories I frequent more often, they're on display. Others are stuck in the back rooms, not particularly special, just tossed into a corner somewhere. Others are like precious, fragile treasures I hide away to protect and keep them alive, I can't share those moments right away and hardly dare look at them myself lest I damage them with rough handling.

Yet time tells on my memories and like the Mona Lisa, they fade. Rusty old swords lie in some corners. It doesn't matter how hard I try to preserve them, whether by sharing, secreting them away, or playing them over and over. The closer I look at my museum pieces, the more I notice the decay, the blurred detail on a picture, or the missing page in a manuscript. I cringe at the faded paint and the empty casing were a gem used to be lodged but has now tumbled out of its setting. I might find it eventually in some unexpected corner...

Some of my memories I don't like, they're the ugly paintings. In these cases, time is often my friend. With time the garish colors fade, the wine mellows, and the pain no longer stings the same. And they say hindsight is 20/20 vision. I can see the good that came from pain and I can savor triumphs without the suspense and agony of the moment. Success memories are like award plaques, medals, and trophies in my collection.

My memory paintings attempt to capture a moment
in time, but what is a picture to the moment itself? If I write them down, the actual moment slips away like sand through an hour glass. It's like pressing a leaf: some of the colors are preserved but the leaf is dry and brittle, and not as bright and glossy as it once was. Artifacts and crumbled journals help us see the past, but they can't take you there. Still, I catalogue my treasures and I write my journals, but it's not the same.

I cannot share my memory museum, I walk these halls alone. When I share a memory it's like giving someone a postcard from the gift-shop. It's a photocopied memory that I let others see. Just as my memories are removed from the actual moment, so too my attempts at sharing them with others are removed another step further from that moment.

It's part of  my personality, I think, to capture and preserve, document, and convey. I'm always writing or taking photos. As a Sensor (Myers-Briggs), I learn from my past experiences, through physical sensations. And I want to share what I experience. How do I capture golden drops of sunlight that flicker through my lashes on a balmy summer morning? I add another artifact (a sensation) to my collection like one adds a painting to a gallery wall. A painting expresses something of its subject, but it's not like being there, in the scene in my mind, experiencing it the way I felt it. So I describe, like a painter paints, I add my own interpretation, how I saw it, and I try to express just what that moment felt like to me.

A thousand years ago feels like yesterday

I felt like they were my neighbors, my relations, my community, these Icelanders from a thousand years ago.

I think it was the style in which their sagas were written.

Many authors these days take an over-the-shoulder, inside-the-soul, point of view with their characters, telling you exactly what the character is thinking and feeling in every excruciating detail. I like that. However, the sagas were not written that way, they were written in a rather external fashion. Yet I felt close to the people.

They seemed real because the lens through which I saw them was as if I were a part of the community. I am told a bit of what they are feeling, I hear of their actions, I know who is best friends with who and how they are related. Just like in real life. In real life I don't know every thought, every pleasure, every pain that passes through my friends, let alone acquaintances that I see frequently.  And so the sagas, by being distant, seem real because I see a community functioning, like my home school co/op, like my extended family, like my Christian community. I see the major events that take place and I hear a little of the inside scoop through those more directly involved.

Additionally the descriptions of people are sometimes vivid, so it's like you can see them. I can see their face and external appearance (physique, clothing), but I can't see their mind. Like real life.

Interestingly, books written in first person or with a very over-the-shoulder view often  leave you guessing as to the person's looks.

They were so human, driven by their feelings of greed, anger, ambition, brokenheartedness and by what was acceptable in their culture.  The women were not meek sheep in the kitchen. A number had strong characters and were driving forces in the stories as they struggled for revenge. And they often manipulated/strong-armed their husbands into getting their way.

And so the sagas easily bridge the gap between then and now, despite culture and language barriers.

Les Misérables

I'd like to start by saying that this post has nothing to do with the Les Misérables film that is coming out in December. I've never even seen the musical Les Misérables. But, where there is smoke there is fire...

Volumes 1&2

So, I undertook to read the original unabridged version in French. Wow, books these days are so different from back then. If someone went on for pages and pages about social darkness and then went back to the story, and then did it again....well, the book probably wouldn't get published without major amputations. But that was then, and this is now. So, the story that was adapted into one of the most popular musical dramas made it to press. Look to the past, learn for the future.

Anyhow, the thing that struck me most about the book is the fact that the title is very fitting. I wish I had kept a tally of how many times the word "misérable" was used.

Basically there are three types of miserable people in this book:

The miserably poor
The emotionally wretched
The wretchedly both

The French word "misérable" is full of meanings. First of all, it is a noun and an adjective like the English word "miserable." One would think it means "miserable" straight-up and simple. But, it actually translates better as "wretched" (adj) or "wretch" (n).  It can also mean "slummy" and "poverty stricken." The French word "misérable" translates to "miserable" when one is talking of a miserable place or situation but not a miserable person.

Sources:
http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/miserable
http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-french/miserable