Prema Jayakumar

When the mellifluous voice of Jim Reeves takes us down the memory lane, telling us that memories are made of all sorts of pleasant things, we are willing to forget that memories can be both good and bad. All memories seem to be of bright moments, of laughter and pleasure, of love and togetherness. A chance glimpse into a strange garden, the lingering end of a tune, the smell of a freshly baked bun and you are ready to enter the world of memories. And yet all of the memories you hold are not necessarily good ones. Memories, strong memories, often the stronger ones, can be of sadness and loss, leaving you permanently associating some sights or tastes with great personal losses.
Memories are deceptive too. Have you sat with a group of people you grew up with and said something about a past scene to have almost everyone correct you on practically all the particulars you were sure you remembered? When my cousins and I get together and we relive some of the holidays we had spent together, this often happens. You thought the scene had taken place in the morning and find that according to some of the others, it took place in the evening. The people who were there are different, the events too change. You might argue but who’s to say that one of you is right and the other wrong? You may even find that you were not part of that scene, it had just been reported so vividly you think you were part of it. All or part of your memory may be false. Or equally, it may be true too. No wonder Rashomon was so easy to relate to, speaking as it did of the unreliability of memories. So also your memories of people. They change, often, according to the changes in you, altering the figure in the past. ‘Who having into truth, by telling of it/ Made such a sinner of his memory,/ To credit his own lie.’
Memories are moulded by what you have done in the meantime, what you have turned into. You would have assigned a certain meaning to something that happened in your childhood because it suits you to think of it in those terms. You may remember particular favours, but they might have been distributed to everyone there. You may see something as malicious, where, once again, it was evenly spread over all present that day. The particularisation is something that you did later, to give that scene, that favour or that punishment further meaning. ‘The memory of past favours, is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful, but it soon fades away. The memory of injuries is engraved on the heart and remains forever.’ That was Halliburton, but I think sometimes distance makes the pleasant ones stand out. Childhood memories are not usually of punishments and scoldings, but rather of treats and games.
If you think further, to possess memories is an entitlement too. Memories need something to mark the days and hours, leisure to let it settle down. Someone who is extremely busy with the minutiae of day to day life might have found it difficult to pause and store memories. It was Camus who said the poor people’s memory is less nourished than that of the rich since it has fewer landmarks. Life goes on more or less evenly, with hardly anything different from day to day. Just getting through the day’s labours with the breaks for food and sleep occupy the whole of the day and night. And there are no landmarks in space as such people travel very little. With so little to mark any difference, how do you place the memories? And fatigue certainly weighs down on memories as on lives. What price true memories of the past then?
You pull out each memory, rather as one used to pull out the card indexes in a library, but do not put them back in order. They are replaced in disorder and can become jumbled in time and place. It is true that no man and no force can abolish memory, but people and circumstances can subvert it. So, be careful when you say, ‘I remember…’