Yesterday a friend was telling me about a visit he made a few years ago to a Buddhist temple in Peshawar. It was run by a former Muslim who had converted to Buddhism. He was together with some Africans and he said everyone felt dazed by the surreal quality of this visit. Here they were, in the heart of Pashtun territory, in Bin Laden land. Just round the corner was that famous bazaar where you can buy an armoured division and get a few Stinger missiles as small change, and they were sitting under a Buddha statue, listening to a sermon on right conduct. One of the Africans, a Sudanese and a devout muslim, was looking in utter amazement at the Buddha idols, the first he had ever seen in Pakistan.
I told my friend that maybe if someone asked this Sudanese about this visit, he would not at first remember having made it - he would need some prodding for his memory to bring it back. When something is too unforgettable, it becomes actually forgettable, because our sense of reality cannot deal with it, and puts it in a corner, under the item "Forteana".
In his foreword to "The Crucible" Arthur Miller says that we do not remember fear, maybe because to do so would be harmful to the brain. Hence, he says, he has difficulty remember remembering the exactly quality of the fear he felt during the Mc Carthy years, except that he knows it was it was there all the time.
Memory has a gland which secretes nostalgia. It is the oil in which float the pickles of memories – most memories, at least. It is a pretty mysterious human faculty. In one of Borges’s stories, a character is not surprised to come across a person able to predict the future. " After all" he reflects " That we possess memory – the capacity to retain the past- is already miraculous. Why not, then, be able to foresee the future ?" True, especially that precognition seems to be as capricious – or , maybe , obeys to laws as obscure as – memory.
There is a story about a tribe in Latin America, which lived on the coast. Once a European three mast dropped anchor well in sight of the village. It stayed there for a few weeks. Nobody in the village noticed it, because it was so beyond their expectation of normality – its size, its fantastic shape – that they could not really "see" it. It is probably a false story, and, like many false stories, has a seductive aspect to it. What if it was really possible that our brain filtered our perception of reality ?
One thing society does, to tame reality, is to put names to things. Actually, names started as generalisations. Tree englobes both pine trees and banana trees. Later, science told us that a banana tree is actually not a tree but a kind of giant grass, but even when we did not know it, banana "tree" worked as a fine and convenient way of naming the thing. Apart from the functionality, names have a reassuring quality. Walking among trees in a silent forest, or watching the leafless silhouette of one against the night sky, it is good to tell oneself that these are trees, it dispels the somewhat menacing air they could have, if not. When Gandalf and the Balrog fall through the mines of Moria, they pass by "nameless things" deep in the bowels of the earth.
Religion is, of course, the Great Explainer of reality. Fortunately, it has suffered some reversals in the past centuries, and new philosophies have been able to germinate, giving us alternative views of reality. Problem is, at the same time, we are suffering a serious problem in another front, which is that of memory. Gone are the days when children would recite whole chapters of Paradise Lost at one go. Not only do we not train our memories like before, but we stuff it with junk. In our year, the average televisionwatcher ingests as much fiction as the people before used to in a whole lifetime. Where does it all go, I wonder ? What if, one day, the walls holding our "remembering fiction" faculty burst, and the stuff overflowed in our memories of life ? Imagine having flashbacks of the day you killed JR, or of the night you left Ingrid Bergman on an airport runway. Unless, in that case, the "selective memory" function still worked, so that you would forget about what you did to JR, and remember everything about Ingrid.