pictures

Day 3486, most dangerous.

Daily picture, Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
Woman and Child

422 Tragedy of childhood. -Not infrequently, it may happen that noble-minded and ambitious people have to undergo their hardest struggle during childhood: perhaps by having to maintain their convictions against a low-minded father given over to pretense and deceit or, like Lord Byron, by living in a continual struggle with a childish and wrathful mother. Anyone who has experienced something like this will never in his life get over knowing who has really been his greatest, most dangerous enemy.

Day 3476, memories in disguise.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry

This picture, which I took, represents a kind of memory for me. What I mean by that is that I don’t remember being there, but it is still an important part of my memories. I remember vaguely the wooden floor and the closeness to the skulls, but…I do remember that these skulls have hunted me in my dreams a couple of times in the past. My memories of being truly there and the even stronger emotions I felt in my dreams are mixed, so the wooden floor I remember might as well not be true; maybe I took this picture from a car when we were on patrol, driving by.

Another thing that is related to this monument in Cambodia, a memorial in remembrance of the millions of people killed during the Pol Pot regime, is the fact that it changed my life. To be clear, my life did not alter course after I saw it for the first time; it was just the tiniest seed that was dropped. Having worked as a UN soldier for five months in a country so different from what I was used to that has changed my perspective. It opened my eyes, and I could see a bigger world than just what I was used to. I got interested in history and politics and started studying in that direction. If people ask me why I am so sensitive to what is happening in the world, I will show them this picture. This monument represents that change.

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Day 3474, more memories.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I want to write about my past, and it makes sense to start at the beginning, simply because that’s where it began. The problem is that most of what I remember is a series of loose facts, such as living there, being with those people, having that job, and whether it was enjoyable or not, or something in between. I can remember what my old room looked like, mostly because I have seen that one picture of the room from time to time, it’s just the picture I remember holding in my hands if I’m honest. I actually don’t know what it is to remember in the sense of reliving it in my mind. 

What I know of the time from before I moved out of my parents’ house is almost nothing. I can string together a story, I remember the story of my youth. I can point to the tree I climbed when I was 11, and looking down from that vantage point for the first time feels like it is etched in my memory, like what vertigo feels like whenever I experience it now. I remember feeling vertigo in that tree, and more than 30 years later, when standing on a 10-story-high balcony. I recall many strong emotions, and they are often associated with a specific place. However, the feelings are real, but I have no certainty that the locations are correct. 

After I moved out, the story became richer, perhaps because I had finally started living my own life, and the vacation was over. The steps I took now, I did for the first time on my own; I paid attention to where I was going. However, as I mentioned earlier, I am a skeptic and don’t entirely trust my own memories, except for the basic facts that I have lived in different places, attended various schools, and held other jobs. Later experiences now taint most of the feelings that accompanied them, and my feelings about specific events have also evolved over the years. I also believe that if you are currently experiencing strong emotions, such as a breakup, you should recognize that you are the last one to have an objective assessment of what is happening. It often takes time to acknowledge that the strong feelings were, for the most part, an exaggeration and a reflection of how the world around you expects that you should react, how your background taught you what an appropriate memory should look like.   

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Day 3473, not ever.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Your past is like a painting, one you remember starting, but not ever finishing.

I want to write about my life, not for the three people who visit my blog, but because I have to fill time, and in the hope that piecing it together will bring back lost memories. 

This last point is important to me because I often tire of the stories I tell myself and others about my adventures. They are all interesting, I believe, but I am also afraid that if I repeat them over and over, they will start living their own lives, one little exaggeration building upon another. I care if the stories I tell have some truth in them. 

But why would I doubt my own memories? I’m a sceptic, and as long as I can remember, I have always asked “why” if confronted with statements. Because many answers to why questions contradicted each other, I turned to other sources, and books are a great one. You cannot only read about other people’s ideas in other regions, but also from other times. If you read the literature, it is clear that we humans have a terrible memory. The problem with memories that primarily revolve around our own experiences is that we must be our own judge, and even if others were present and collaborated on our story, we still need to be cautious. One article I read, as an example, was about an experiment conducted by a young psychology student. He interviewed a group of people just after 9/11 and wrote down their experience, where they were, and what they felt. More than a decade later, he interviewed these people again and asked them where they were during that critical time. Several participants in this experiment insisted that their recollections were accurate, despite clearly conflicting with what actually happened in reality and with what they wrote down immediately after the event. They misremembered, but they were also sure they were right. 

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