Dean Martin's crooning version is possibly the best, "Sweet, sweet, the memories you gave me," declare the luxuriant backing singers, like some hypnotic message designed to lull you to sleep and into those sweet if slightly fabricated dreams.
As the human aging process progresses what were once crystal clear memories morph into odd randomized items, curios and junk tossed into an overloaded and difficult to access psychedelic skip. There's no clear filing or location method, items stay where they fell, mixed up and buried. However that does make the process of recall a lot more interesting and generally means that looking back on life, the possibly fictionalized memories become increasingly more real than the real ones ever did. A bit like how the western world writes it's history I suppose. We're all at it. Unreliable memoirs are written and over written continually.
After a while nobody can contradict you about your own version of your life ... the strange beauty and benefits of now dead witnesses paying off. Facts don't matter, just a dynamic narrative. So you self edit according to the outcomes you'd prefer to believe as you go along. After a while they slowly become real and superimpose themselves over the other (realistic but tedious or disappointing) versions. Eternal life is therefore faintly living on in the minds of others as your own bungled work of fiction, coloured by the wreckage of the indifferent recollections of your peers.
No comments:
Post a Comment