It is a strange thing when I go into the hills alone and trudge across the plateau and across the braes and fells. It seems that time takes on another quality (or perhaps discards a certain quality) as each time if I later try to recall it I can barely remember anything. To be sure, I can recall 'a journey' and various markers along the way, but am hard-pressed to give you, at least immediately, any details or any specifics. The physical flow of the body translates itself into a metaphysical flow of mind. With the self completely involved in the moment, it is as if the self has stepped out of itself, whilst simultaneously stepping outside the strictures of space and time. Removed from all agenda, life itself dissipates, along with the self. All that remains is an unconscious ecstasy. The journey is, at best, a vague out-line, always outside of the carefully packaged self. And within that ecstatic vagueness, memories themselves dissipate.
There's a fine line, I once wrote in an essay on these very hills, between selfishness and Selfishness. Likewise, here, I believe there to be a similarly fine line between memory and Memory.
There's a fine line, I once wrote in an essay on these very hills, between selfishness and Selfishness. Likewise, here, I believe there to be a similarly fine line between memory and Memory.
Let me elaborate.
I believe that the rise today of dementia related diseases, and of cognitive collapse, is not just down to the changing ways of nutrition and ways of living, or indeed old age, but emphatically down to ignorance of self. People have been waylaid from day one, (and continue to be hit over the head with a rather heavy modernization stick on a daily basis), and as a result, find themselves someway down the line, in a situation, cognitively and ontologically, of complete despair as to who they actually are. There is a profound sense of failure at the most visceral level, at not having lived, (and logically not being able to die), and worse still, at having out-sourced this living to some thing else that they're not quite able to put their finger on. And there's the rub. This is what Shakespeare hit on so eloquently and yet so concisely: 'to be or not to be, that is the question'. And it still is the question. Indeed, it might be the only question and the only quest for man today. There may be no more urgent imperative than this quest for selfhood, and for re-cognition, a re-cognition that is at once and the same a non-re-cognition.
There is a reason why old people (age is a matter of arteries, not years) tell every young child they meet to take care of their health, that it's all that matters.
There is a reason why old people (age is a matter of arteries, not years) tell every young child they meet to take care of their health, that it's all that matters.
Thoreau, a human who removed himself from the distractions of society and went to the woods to live deliberately, remarked way back in the mid 1800s of the quiet desperation of people's lives; this desperation is still with us, but it is no longer quiet; all you need do, if you live in a congested enough city, is to walk outside, or look at the time-ridden faces of your neighbours, and prescription-dependent friends and colleagues. Read the newspapers, listen to the news - it will reveal in an instant the desperation Thoreau and others spoke of.
Modernity, and its desperate ways, have compartmentalised the brain-body and filed 'them' away under 'B'. No longer are we an integral part of the process of nature, but rather just another product in the assembly line of man-made consumer capitalism. The body-brain has been loaded to one side like a ship with too much ballast. We become unstable, veer to one side, start to take on water, begin to sink... and all the while we are going off course. Our precious cargo slips into the water. Obesity is simply the physical mirror of this existential and ontological destitution. We have run aground, and now we are clambering about like fairground monkeys trying, impossibly, to retrofit our hindsight onto the past.
Our 'belonging' (just another way of recognising our place within the greater system) has been destroyed in the true sense of the word, that is, de-structured.
So what about memory?
Well now, we live in a society (sedated and sedentary) where memories are more 'important' than ever (in the same way that commodities are important), and where time and space (emphatically segregated) are not only packaged commodities themselves but, quite alarmingly, things to kill and die for. Indeed, memories have become 'imports' and 'exports', we collect and gather them as if they were sea shells and we can't export them quickly enough onto the panoply of social network platforms that we have constructed for this purpose. Memories have become a fully-fledged industry, and this industrialization of memory (and, by extension, of time) has torn us apart from our greater identity which is at once timeless and indivisible.
Experience, however, left to ferment at its deepest level and 'let be' from this hefty pressure of industrialisation-commodification, becomes instinct, becomes Memory. This fermentation process is a function of a moving-stillness, that is, slow-burning, moving meditations which in-source one's own energy and which inculcate a sense of contemplation. In delving in to the originary body, in sourcing one’s own auto-mobility, the self is grooved into the earth and the earth, likewise, is grooved into the self. On the ground, understanding becomes incarnate, not simply notional. Memory widens out, spatially, temporally. It leaves behind annotations. It becomes delineated and recondite within the earth herself.
Experience that has transcended the barrier of conscious identity, and which has thus embedded itself in the innermost part of the self, rises to the surface un-annotated, as mysterious and mystical notions that cannot themselves be pinned down. Experience has thus matured into memory, into instinct. This affords us the possibility of transcendence itself: expansion into nothingness (or, equally, the light), and harmony (and total identity-identification) not just with the living earth but with everything. Conversely, memories toyed with, and commodified, force us under the weight of the past and the pressures of the future, denying us the possibility of the present, and of any lightness whatsoever. Thus, one can say, as the German philologist Heymann Steinthal once remarked: The animal has memory, but no memories. And we can thus infer: Man has memories, but no memory.
Experience, however, left to ferment at its deepest level and 'let be' from this hefty pressure of industrialisation-commodification, becomes instinct, becomes Memory. This fermentation process is a function of a moving-stillness, that is, slow-burning, moving meditations which in-source one's own energy and which inculcate a sense of contemplation. In delving in to the originary body, in sourcing one’s own auto-mobility, the self is grooved into the earth and the earth, likewise, is grooved into the self. On the ground, understanding becomes incarnate, not simply notional. Memory widens out, spatially, temporally. It leaves behind annotations. It becomes delineated and recondite within the earth herself.
Experience that has transcended the barrier of conscious identity, and which has thus embedded itself in the innermost part of the self, rises to the surface un-annotated, as mysterious and mystical notions that cannot themselves be pinned down. Experience has thus matured into memory, into instinct. This affords us the possibility of transcendence itself: expansion into nothingness (or, equally, the light), and harmony (and total identity-identification) not just with the living earth but with everything. Conversely, memories toyed with, and commodified, force us under the weight of the past and the pressures of the future, denying us the possibility of the present, and of any lightness whatsoever. Thus, one can say, as the German philologist Heymann Steinthal once remarked: The animal has memory, but no memories. And we can thus infer: Man has memories, but no memory.
It is this, I believe, that has caused the rise in dementia that we see today, a rise that will continue into the 21st century which will perhaps be the century noted for mental illness and disease on an unprecedented scale. Disease, you see, cannot be avoided at this rate of modernization. As a collective entity, our health depends on all, and we're not just talking physical health. Wholeness cannot be compartmentalised. The more global communications become the more aware we become (albeit for most on a subconscious level) of the intrinsic sickness afflicting mankind (and by extension, all other sentient creatures, and everything else for that matter too).
Reconnecting to memory, and not memories, is the way to health, for then it will lead to action and compassion. Only then will we truly be able to remember and recall the self in all its fullness. The membership of the All first begins with a reconstituting and a re-membering of the self.
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A Trinity of Hills - Theos, Cosmos, Anthropos aka. Big, Middle, & Little Duncolm -
The Reconstitution of Self on the Kilpatrick Plateau...
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