This article was written exclusively for The Geist magazine's final publication. I am posting it here in full - found it fitting for the end of the year.
“There are certain people who if they are absent life becomes hard to bear. .... These are the people who once sat close to you in Paradise.' It is a beautiful idea, isn't it....”- “Heat and Dust”, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
As children, we were told not to look down the wells and their depths — for the pull of death and oblivion would be too strong and the gravity would be too much for the young, frail body to resist. This is why, they explained to us, the young children and infants often died — they remember the peaceful slumber of the womb all too well. Provided for and nourished, shielded from the knowledge of “good and evil” and spared the growth of adult teeth that must bite into the flesh of others, it appeared gentler, nobler than the world we wake up in at birth. There is a piece of this infant that longs for death within us even as we grow older, and the allure of death-like slumber has to be resisted for life.
There is an inherent shame we feel about existing and being alive — about the demands placed upon us, the heaviness and ignorance and confusion that surrounds it. Within the world of ignorance, heaviness and confusion, we look for some piece of beauty and truth, perhaps remembering Paradise, to redeem us from our heavy station.
The death that allures is memory, and so is the Paradise that we seek to recover. We are a memory to ourselves — what we are and what we think of ourselves is based on our perceptions of the past, of the things we remember and the things we chose to forget and discard, deeming them insucient to form the mythology of our lives. And as the impressions within the corners of our minds create our personal mythologies, the impressions and mythologies of us come to exist in the minds and memories of others too. Often, we are curious of the reflections we cast, and we seek for something or someone that shall reflect ourselves to us, allowing us, even for a short moment, to know ourselves. “God is the Mirror in which my Light is reflected” is our in-born creed.
How lucky or unlucky is a human being, for whom blessing and the curse are the same — to forget and to remember. To forget oneself is to be free of one’s identity— and we seek this freedom in our desire to share our identity with the Other. And yet to forget is also to be bound to the ghost one cannot see — to be free, in such a case, and to eventually be able to share one's self, one first must remember and look without fear at the photographs and diaries hidden in basements and attics.
Once upon a time, memory terrified me — when one opens the old diaries and looks for old photographs, the ghosts emerge, and the dreams become filled with terror, with the things once thought long forgotten. My ghosts have over time, set me free. Life too, with years, becomes so big and long that so little is remembered. There is so little even worth remembering. Still, a moment or two occurs that one wishes to remember. And suddenly, the prospect of oblivion, and not memory, is what came to terrify. Instead of wanting to forget, I came wishing to remember those few moments when life felt like it carried some truth, when it felt like something more than passing images on the screen. I wished to remember forever, praying that the terrifyingly lost course of mundane life won’t swallow it.
In order to preserve the memory, I create my own liturgical calendar — on this and this day I light a white candle and this and this, it is a red one that I light. Entire life would in an instant turn meaningless, all events mere mirages without that one impression that I wish to carry with myself forever, beyond death and beyond the grave. That memory is what shall wake me up from the deep well and into the renewed life. In that moment, there shall be the singular ray of Light that I recognise is mine and that the eye always responds to.
This one memory that I hold within myself survives ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, it survives wars and peace agreements; the kings and the queens changed, and the presidents and the prime minister, and the borders, and the economies fell and rose, and still on this and this day, like a faithful pilgrim, I light my candle. What do the waxes and wanes have to do with me? Or the kings and prime ministers? What am I to changing maps? I only have my candle to take care of. When all is erased, when even my own myth will feel foreign, I shall remember the Image in the Heart, more real than me, more real than life, more me than myself.
If the image of death is the image of a deep, dark well into which one is to fall, then the image of life has to be in the candle that is lit in the dark alleys of churches and temples. The darkness that pulled us to extinguish our light before it even grew stronger, is now the one to hold the candlelight – light that creates no shadows against its walls, for it shines not from above but from within. And so, to remember and to hold the memory, I light a candle to it and tend to the fire of my Star, like one tends to a statue of a deity or a saint. The fear and allure of death disappears in a dutiful, laborious and satisfying eort of remembering. Death itself becomes life — life renewed and resurrected, life perfect just how it once was.