tickle fight!

One of the new blank journals I recently purchased has the small word “Mnemosyne” in the upper right hand corner of the plain, black cover.  After some research, I found out that Mnemosyne is the Goddess (or rather, Titaness) of Memory.  Which I think is a cool thing to put on the cover of a journal.

According to Encyclopedia Brittanica (remember them!?):

In ancient Greek myth, Mnemosyne (Memory), the mother of the Muses, is said to know everything, past, present, and future. She is the Memory that is the basis of all life and creativity. Forgetting the true order and origin of things is often tantamount to death (as in the case of Lethe, the river of death in Greek mythology, which destroys memory).

Some of the North American medicine men claim to remember their prenatal existence. Such memory, according to their mythology, is lost in ordinary people. Similar myths of memory and forgetting are related to the hierarchy that exists in all archaic societies. The fundamental knowledge of the world, transcending ordinary consciousness, is not equally attainable by everyone. Myths of memory can take the form of collective nostalgia.

In South America the Yaruros, whose material existence was so simple that they lacked the skills of the agricultural and pastoral life, were one of the many tribes that in the face of modern Western cultural expansion gave up the struggle for their own social and cultural identity, becoming assimilated into a more complex society. As the Yaruros ceased to struggle for the preservation of their tribal identity, they expressed a yearning to return to the Great Mother ruling the land of the dead and awaiting them in her paradise.

Mythologies of memory and forgetting have a role in many traditions. They are of great significance in traditions where the idea of rebirth or reincarnation exists. Some people have claimed to remember previous existences, and a few (among them the Buddha) the very first. The veil of maya (“illusion”) in many Indian stories prevents a man from remembering his true origin and goal. In Gnosticism there is talk of a similar forgetfulness, which must be resisted.

Anamnesis, “commemoration” or “recollection,” is one of the crucial parts of the Christian celebration of the Communion. Through the anamnesis, the passion and death of the Lord is “applied” to the congregation. In philosophy, the imagery of forgetting and remembering occurs in the thought of Śaṅkara, a medieval Indian philosopher, and of Plato in connection with the paramount calling of the thinker and the difficulty of living up to that calling.

I like the idea of a concept rooted so heavily in tradition, in addition to the fact that it plays such an important role in multiple cultures.  And I find the malleability of this concept extremely interesting, since memory is so affected by the influences of revisionism and the question and flexibility of “truth.”

Hopefully the memories I jot down in my new journal will enable me to exist in a more enlightened state.  Or my forgetfulness will surely be the end of me.  

xxx