I’ve learned through trial and error that thinking something smart is easy, but, to have that smart thought cross the transom, to leave me and make contact with someone outside of my mind, is hard.

Once that thought has expressed itself, it’s often discovered, by me first and the listener second, to be unimpressive, unimaginative, dull. I have also learned to be intellectually humble and to not hold my thoughts dear.

A wise person once told me: “be suspicious of your own thoughts unless you are certain of their authorship.” I think it might have been me who said it because when I turned around he was gone. In any event it was good advice. What I think I meant by this is that I can feel the way my thoughts interact and influence each other, like people at a party, but this also means that the provenance of each guest has to be interrogated.

Of course this can’t be done for each idea, that would render the thinker, not dead, but immobilized. Which thoughts are mine and which have been put into me and I am just their caretaker?

I have never thought of myself as a good writer or, as the English may say, “Fancy with the quill¹” but I am certain that the thoughts, however inelegantly I introduce them into the aether, are mine.

Here’s a secret word for you: it is only found in musty old books in thousand year old libraries in Illuminati homes, spoken at Skull and Bones initiation rites, Post Office ceremonies and retirement parties. The word is segue.

What is memory?

There’s a lot of scientific analysis and behavioral sciences that explain how memoric goo works, what affects it, the different types of memory such as autobiographical and associative and so on and so on.

Memories are instructions

In the movie Dark City (only watch the Director’s Cut), memories are implanted into people living only at night. For the residents, time is being expanded and collapsed like a telescope. Every day when they wake up they are somebody different. The movie is based on the true story of the infamous ‘Bewarshire Genip.’

In the 1400s, the Bewarshire Governor, famed artist and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci, assembled hundreds of people as the unwilling subjects of his diabolical experiments.

Every 24 hours the townsfolk were shuffled into a new name, body, home, family, education and profession, it was all changed. The blacksmith that was, became the farmer, and then became something else, and something else, and something else. Blue eyed father of five Giovanni did not know that he fell asleep as brown eyed beggar Niccolo.

The experiment was only discovered after da Vinci’s death. In his will he wrote “free the musical chairs” with a sad face emoji, that led to an inquiry and the whole unpleasant affair revealed.

Of course all the people of the town had to be hanged (illustration 9) as they no longer had any sense of reality about them, time and memory were decoupled as all their memories were recreations of experiences they never had.

The End?

FOOTNOTES

¹ fuck off