In Shallow Seas We Sail

I've been confronted by important notions about forgetting recently, which connects to ideas in the novel I read over Christmas that discusses the necessity to forget in order to heal. But it places one in a peculiar situation when you are the one that needs to be forgotten. Or rather, you are the one that has been forgotten.

Our memories are the crux of who we are, how we remember (read: interpret) the past controls who we are in the present. We build upon the structural foundation of the identity we've decided upon (though our options are more like multiple choice questions to the situations we encounter, with the options being the different cultural maps [perspectives] we've been handed, with no real limit to our decisions but the limits we accept). But what happens when the crux of me (of all of us) is meant to be temporary, meant to be malleable for the future (read: present) in order for us to adapt, to cope; destroying, rebuilding, and re-destroying ourselves perpetually.

Why hold onto any past? Because without it we become apathetic and callous to the people around us, to the people who hold onto some piece of us in the vain belief they know the reality of our perceptions and past. We hold onto the past that taught us how to be safe when trouble comes, using our personal maps. Maps that are filled with landmarks and metropolises in a land of fantasy, personal fantasy. None of these places exist, but they tells us what "truth" is. But there's a difference between being able to discuss the civilizations of our past when there are others to confirm the old architecture and the disasters that shattered them in the first place then when confronted with wandering through the wreckage in solitude; a fertile land, turned into a wasteland. Or was it always a wasteland? The present too will become a wasteland. And once we forget it, it will be nothing.

Like us, individuals in a system that specifically needs the individuals it created. But tightly clutching our maps, needing them to feel, but binding us to the ever shifting images on the page. Finding meaning in the forgotten ruins; the ruins that don't exist, which cannot be visited by anyone who wasn't there to see them with us (or who have a completely different picture of the same places). But they need to forget seeing them, they need to look to their own map, while I look at the crumbling piece of paper in front of me.

We will be forgotten, eventually by everyone; until we are the only ones who hold onto a meaningless map, full of directions to treasures that don't exist to anyone else. And only the lucky ones even make it to this stage, when we can see the futility of our maps, the rest die before getting to that point, and are forgotten even sooner. But being remembered has no value. The value is in the temporary landmarks, on the constantly changing landscape. Just because the strings become visible does not change the power they have over us.

This may be incomprehensible garbage, but it too will be forgotten.

I know I've posted this before, but it's relevant.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them-- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried when you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for the want of a teller but for the want of an understanding ear.
-Stephen king