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Forgetting, Part 5

July 15, 2014

Ask around — it was not uncommon. After the release of The Joy Luck Club (the movie) it was not infrequent for younger Asian-Americans to interview their grandparents. And we were not immune — ours was put on tape, later to be digitized to CD and audio file.

I wasn’t present; my sisters and some cousins were, along with two aunts to act as translators. The start is plain and straightforward — little of note, mostly just-the-facts. And those facts only came with prompting. About her first husband:

And apparently no one bothered to explain this meeting’s purpose with my grandmother.

Later on, however, she did warm up as she got into the thick of things. Here she tells of her years in the old country when the Communists took over.

And then more deeply about the same.

Then a return to earlier days, almost earlier than my grandmother.

Then eventually back to the modern day.

And finally.

My grandmother went on to live about another ten years. To the best of my knowledge, none of us ever spoke to her in this fashion again. Whether she ever asked anyone in my family about this one instance I don’t know.

My father will never be interviewed. His dementia, of course, but also: it has never been in my father to relate the truthful details. Though not to say he would be dishonest, exactly: he would relate his honest feeling, his honest gist. Whatever sense of things he would honestly want to remember. But the meat and truth of a matter — typically not so much. An interview with my father in the days before his dementia might not have revealed much more than today.

Without memory there is no history, and without history there is no past. And if there is no past, is there then no time? (If a tree falls in the forest and no one remembers, did the tree ever fall?) Is this the case, then, that time is perception? That it’s only our own memory that makes up time?

If this is the nature of our fourth dimension, then what of our other three? Is it only our perception of those three (and our memory of our perception) that gives form to space and time? Or is the question itself moot, that space and time are identical whether they exist outside of ourselves or only in our minds? After all, is there a difference? Does the existence or non-existence of reality outside ourselves have any effect, either practically or philosophically?

Is the universe in fact our perception? Is it in fact ours — our doing, our invention? Or is this a tautology, since being made from the universe, we then go on to make our own universe? And — if this is the case, if in fact the universe is our own making — does this turn our notion of the universe into nothing or into everything?

And does that then make our eventual death into more than just a personal death? With our death do we condemn our universe — all space and time — to our selfsame fate? Are we not destined to be destroyers of every mote, every second, every glory, every banality, every joy, every grief, every problem and solution, every gratification and regret? But then isn’t it our right, after all — as builders — to destroy what we have built? Or — once a thing has been built — does it declare a right to its own existence?

(Or do you kick at the universe's dimensions and say, I refute it thus?)

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