As I erode in the trepidation of my recollection of all that was, I am reminded that all that was no longer is. To say the past is the past is—with no reverence to the melancholy of reality—a reality where everything changes once we look at it and as such it is merely colloquial; reality is much simpler in the brain.
Our senses, the one thing that allows us to comprehend our surroundings, is the one thing that falters during recollection. It is said that the brain is built for survival. As such, the archival process of memory can be said to be one where there is a warehouse of file cabinets where all that happens is taken in with a proverbial wheelbarrow to its final destination. Upon entering the warehouse, the wheelbarrow is tipped over and emptied, to be returned to the surface of now and bring it into storage in a perpetual chain. Yet, the information dropped off needs to be broken down to be placed in the respective areas where each sense perceived is stored. This, a chain of endless treks to nothing from the no longer or that which is and will never again be. There are 5 sections to the warehouse, each one belongs adeptly to one of our senses. Imagine your recollection taking the form of a young person with a bag rummaging through fallen aspects of things that were along the way, a way now paved in the muddy rivers of what can never be what was. The person fills the bag with what resembles that which looks like what is needed in order to put the memory back together for recollection and takes it to the front desk for the puzzle to be put together by, hopefully, someone adept at such a thing.
How many sneakers have you seen in your life? How many while walking and looking at the ground as people walk and wear them haphazardly for your recollecting needs? What about during an online search, as a means of an example, when you ask for tips on what to converse about during an informal gathering and the search returns of a brand of sneakers called Converse? How many sneakers? See, when we try to recollect someone, sneakers may be the last thing you’re looking for; yet our survival-rigged brain needs that minutia in order to put together a whole of the puzzle we dare call memory. Can it sort through a whole section of your brain to find that one pair of sneakers in the visual section of the warehouse? A Converse is as good as an Adidas as long as the person is wearing sneakers. The brain does this for every aspect of a memory we wish to rehash. Here is the smell of Drakkar Noir you smelled on someone at a party one time, when what you were truly attempting to recall was a time at the mall when you walked by the cologne/perfume counter and smelled Wings on someone you wished to recall in the now.
That being complex enough already is not enough. Some may say, I am not giving our brains the recognition it deserves for all the powerful things it does. I would say, “perhaps”. Yet, a Ph.D may say that something is uncompromising where a theoretical physicist may say, all things must adapt to that which we say we know, versus all the magic around us. To say that we remember anything is about the biggest lie all humans share in. We recognize the factors that were present at a point in time with the help of our warehouse and the lazy workers in it. But the facts, those only existed at a particular moment in time that will never be recalled again. If 100 people shared a moment, putting together the 100 recollections will get us over 9 factorial stories in the end, each with different colors, smells, scents, sounds, and how it all felt.
Thus, I digress in my erosion in the way to the next event I will never recollect, just as happy as I was before discussing how incredibly meaningless it all is in the end. To argue that one looks at the past in such a sense that the same mistakes will not be made, is just as big as any other lie we choose to profess. Humans are nothing but predictable. Carl Sagan noted the Earth as a “pale blue dot” in a space of immeasurable size, an Earth where wars rage; wars that plague us even today. Has war not ravaged the Earth long enough for any one person or group, nation or countries to understand that war is bad and therefore a mistake of the past that should not be reproduced? Predictable. We do what we do mostly because we want to; damned be that which is going to prevent me from accomplishing what I want, when I want, and how I want it; be it to err or war makes no difference.
Returning to when I answered with perhaps, the brain, complex as it may be, still is merely the brain of a human, one that is unable to recollect with precision a mistake made in order not to fall where we once faltered. Even if that capacity were possible, what does it really mean in the end?
