Memories…

Why settle for memories? The corners of my mind, misty, scattered, baloney! Give me the real thing! “Don’t dream it, be it!” (Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Turns out, there are two ways of remembering – there’s the misty watercolored kind, enjoyed by muggles everywhere; and then there’s ‘re-membering’, enjoyed by Marcel Proust…and now you!

Unwittingly of course, Heidegger set the stage. He distinguished Dasein (that it is) from Wassein (what it is). Sartre translated, as he does: ‘Existence and Essence’. 

I remember going to what turned out to be ‘the game of the century’: Harvard-Yale, 1968, 28 – 28, both teams ending the season undefeated. (Havard scored 16 points in the final 58 seconds.) Exciting time…and I remember it.

I remember the game and how I felt at the end. I remember the people I was with. But I don’t remember ‘being there’. Of course, I know that I was there, I know that I watched the game and emoted at the outcome, but I don’t remember ‘being there’. I don’t remember what it felt like to be me at that moment in time.

On the other hand, I do re-member looking out my grandparents’ bedroom window at the blinking red lights atop a local TV tower…and I even remember thinking, “I’m going to re-member this.” And I do. 

I re-member looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at a friend’s house. I re-member standing at the window of my first apartment looking out at the ‘forum’ below. In these cases too, I thought to remember.

But not all re-membering needs to be scheduled in advance. There are hosts of other scenes from my past that, accidentally, I re-member and then there are others that I merely remember.

The contents of every memory (Wassein), like every experience, are unique. It’s forever thumbtacked to a particular spot on the spatiotemporal grid. What is ‘eternal and universal’ about any experience is its transitory nature: “This too shall pass!”

Re-membering is something altogether different. ‘Being there’ is, well, being there! And being there is being there – one and done, now and forever, Amen. Dasein itself is unique. Translated into ‘modern geek’: Wassein =  ∞, Dasein = 1. Dasein is one, simple (it has no qualia), eternal, and universal. 

Hmm, sounds a lot like someone else I know…but that’s a different essay! For now, let’s hear Proust describe his experience:

“The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation…

“…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other… The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…”

‘Seemed to me to be the present moment’, and so it was! Wassein is a function of spacetime. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong) = experience now, memory later. 

Dasein, on the other hand, occurs outside of spacetime. It is the universal and eternal present whose shadow we see across our continuous, bright-lit, and potentially infinite timeline. 

While every quantum of experience/memory has a specific spacetime address, the Being that underlies all experience is homeless, a citizen of nowhere, a denizen of everywhere. (Like Jesus in Bethlehem?)

As Proust put it, “…(What) had reawakened in me had no connection with what I frequently tried to recall to myself…with the help of an undifferentiated memory…those quite different images that preserve nothing of life… (and) I knew that Lost Time would not be found again on the Piazza of St. Marks…

“There is a vast difference between the real impression that we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it that we form for ourselves when we attempt, by an act of will, to imagine it…” (i.e. to remember it).

Surprisingly, consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato (Timaeus).  Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: 

X

↙      ↘

X’     →      Z

In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself (X’) being aware of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (X’) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. 

In short, ‘re-membering’ reveals something fundamental about experience. It is timeless. I am now just as much sitting in my 5th grade classroom as I am sitting at this computer typing out this essay. Nothing passes, everything endures, not as mere memory, but as it is.

***

Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a haunting, dreamlike scene where empty streets and long shadows evoke a timeless stillness. This atmosphere reflects the essay’s exploration of memory as something elusive and misty, contrasting with the vivid, immersive re-membering that brings past experience fully into the present moment.