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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Spirituality also comes up in the interview with Floyd Skloot. In your conversation with him you quote from his book, "In the Shadow of Memory," in which he describes himself "dwelling more in the wider realm of sense and emotion, out of mind and into body, into heart. An altered state."
And how he lives in the Zen now, which he discovered, and I discovered myself. It also comes up in the interview with David Shenk, about Alzheimer's disease. He suggests in his book "The Forgetting" that the short-circuiting of memory forces Alzheimer's sufferers to be always in the now. He suggests further that it leads to an actual heightening of consciousness, and I had connected that with the Buddhist idea of existing in the moment, and discovering the infinite in the finite of each instant.
He received some angry letters from people who felt this was cruel, to suggest that there was something positive about Alzheimer's. But he had learned about this from an Alzheimer's sufferer, a man named Morris Friedell, who claimed that Alzheimer's sufferers can appreciate clouds and leaves and flowers as they never could before. They live in the present; they don't have a past. They don't even remember their childhoods. They don't remember their family. They don't remember anybody.
And this is an idea that has resonance with you? Do you find that you're more attentive to leaves, clouds, habitués of the moment?
"On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering"
By Jonathan Cott
Random House
214 pages
Nonfiction
Yes, I am. The seeds were always there, but my loss of memory definitely made it much more real to me, and made me cherish moments much more than I ever did before. But that really has less to do with loss of memory than one's own spiritual development, one's own sense of awareness, and how you can heighten that through self-discipline.
Last question. In the book you mention a story from a diary by Jean Cocteau, in which he returns to the house where he grew up. Running his hand along the wall behind the house, as he used to as a child, the memories come rushing back to him. "Just as the needle picks up the melody from the record, I obtained the melody of the past with my hand." Do you ever stop believing that one day your memories will come back to you?
No, I don't think they will.
So you're resigned to that.
Yes, I am. Although in the book I do quote several spiritual teachers who say we are our memories, and therefore whether we remember them or not they're still with us. And so I'm hoping that in some slightly mystical way they are still with me, in my body somewhere. It's like when I wake up from a dream and I remember for a split second the content of the dream, the images in the dream, and then a second later I don't remember anything. But for that split second I remember them, and I think that maybe in some way those images have filtered down and integrated into my consciousness. Or my subconsciousness, let's put it that way. And they are there to draw on. But I don't know. That's just a mystical belief.
I just want to tell you it was a pleasure talking about this, because when I talk about it, it clears up the blur, the haze. If there's a chance that you could make a copy of the conversation, that would be wonderful, because the questions touched on experiential matters and social matters that I want to keep in my mind and not forget.
