Forrest Memory

Memory is not a garden. Memory is a forest. It grows on its own, its composition does not depend on us. Of course, we would prefer it to be otherwise. This is probably also why we invented gardens – landscapes with a whole staffage of symbolic elements: specific plants, a stream, a flower pot, arbours with various names, the most pretentious of which today seems to be the Temple of Reflection/Thoughtfulness/Thinking, (the cone of silence)? and even with paths marked with meaning. Everything is imbued with a symbolism that was alive and comprehensible at the time of its creation, but is completely forgotten and completely misunderstood today. And we wanted so much to control it. Over it, over memory.
The more time passes, the more certain we become that we have not been given much certainty even about our own memories. At first it seems to us that we can embed memories in our consciousness, as if we were planting a tree, but what we took to be the garden of memory we were creating has nothing to do with it. Suddenly – it’s always “suddenly” – we realise that apart from peculiar artefacts of our memory, remembered deliberately, we carry in ourselves many other “memories”, embedded in us without our will and so numerous that we are not able to embrace them consciously even if we wanted to…

Suddenly, we wake up in the middle of a forest that grows out of the soil of our life, that feeds on it and relies on it. Perhaps we have planted some trees ourselves, making an effort to remember, perhaps – if we have acquired the virtue of mindfulness – we have done so many times, but it always turns out that around the memory-trees we have planted, a forest of self-sowing trees has grown up. The branches of the trees – the neurons of memory, the tentacles of memories, spread out in all directions, tangle with the neighbouring ones, mysteriously evoking each other with strange associations. Perhaps, if we knew, if we knew the order, if we understood which memories take place next to which ones, we would understand the order of their emergence from the thicket of memory. But we do not know. Perhaps if we paid more attention to ourselves, to the forest, to life, there would be no fear in us of entering the thicket…
And perhaps it is only to the eternal forest that we should turn…