Forgetting

Memory is a faculty that forgets, and that’s good. Anandamide is a bit of a factor, a close relative of THC that is so popular with marijuana enthusiasts.

If we had to remember each of our actions, our looks, all the movements of a crowd, every noise of the roads, all the words, we would not last more than a few moments before we’d be stopped by the influx of information. We are therefore made to forget, to delay, and to retain what will have meaning for us. We discriminate to understand better, embrace, even love.

This work is done without our conscious supervision. I have as proof our dreams, which sometimes reveal what is simmering in this soup of memories. Some beasts and gods have escaped our vigilance. Our personal world is thus slowly being built on a cautious foundation. Fate then surprises us by breaking the balance, by removing this card, there, at the base of our house of cards. If it is easy to forget, it is just as easy to get confused.

What if, in reality, the brain holds everything back and possesses the vertiginous power to create a coherent world before us? Seeing the human-Earth turns the way it does must be an explanation of this kind. People forget and build extensive scaffolding to reach Spain. Reality escapes us and our freedom panics and destroys the air, trapped in the strings that a sleeping puppeteer keeps pulling, himself a slave to his dark nights.

I love these labyrinths, even if they sometimes frighten me. I don’t do drugs, actually a little bit with caffeine and alcohol. So, so little. Yet my memory is such selective that it surprises me every time it suddenly has fun, and for its only apparent pleasure, rebuilding my words. I must not have all the prescribed anandamide in my brain.