The hours of unawareness
Peter Gerocs
In the past few years the focus of my main interest drifted to the processing of memories. There are personal reasons behind but this didn't make any difference. Actually, I had to forgot about myself in this case.
I was researching for years. In my case it means I wrote a novel. It is a story about a man who tries to get rid of his memory (the reason 'why' is not important now). The writing process itself took around two years and when I got to the finalization (of the text) I realised what my story was about. The main character has no memory, at least no longer than a few seconds, therefore he must document every detail of his life, in writing. This is one half of the plot. The other half is about a man who is literally a real misanthrope. The two men are the same person biologically, but mentally - the opposite. In what sense? In the sense of morality. So I could take a great conclusion (beside several other things): who lives outside of time, has got no morality.
There was a brilliant Hungarian writer, who said that once: "The only person who can be fundamentally objective, the one who has every reason to be partial." I suppose I understand it now.
So for me the word 'hour' means: a slice of time, which gives the opportunity to forget or to remember certain things.
When somebody has just forgot a thing, which is obviously not a describable moment, this action has nothing to do with morality. But if somebody recalls a past event, that action is absolutely moral.
This is not like we remember something and afterwards we reflect on the process, and not even that we arrange the elements of a bigger story so we can remember it. I think a memory comes upon or rather strikes into our mind and at the same time the source of the memory is also in us. So our mind must have an intention why it needs to recall a certain thing. My idea is this: the moral phase belongs to the needs of our mind. Where the memory is being formed, already there it necessarily has to be categorized as good or bad. That is not so complicate: we recall something because we enjoy it or we need to get rid of that memory (like in mourning). We define ourselves by remembering, we define our relations with acquaintances also by remembering, which means we try to experience a highly abstract thing simply by sensations: the progress of our personality. This may be a bit similar to dreaming.
Actually a significant part of our lifetime is spent without reflective self-consciousness, when we do things without thinking about it, but the other equally big part is when we are in the territory of our memories to find answers to things that we did before without being completely aware. I believe these are the most incredible hours of our life and also the most sensitive moments. It’s like we are not able to be in the universe of our memory while there are other people nearby. We need perfect isolation. Not that we look for the opportunity to be alone for the sake of our memories (except diary-writing), they just come if we are not occupied by any activities. Remembering needs a strong presence; otherwise the memory slips away. We know nothing about ourselves when we remember/. Not only people are eliminated from the activity of my remembering, but also myself. I think we do not exist when a scene of the past appears in front of us. The scene exists instead of us and we can be only spectators. I do not mean it like in cinema: this is not only watching something, but by watching we define it without realising it. We try to live what we can not control, we connect to our own acts. However it is a personal action, it is about 'not to be'. The action and the person who performs it are too close. It means: recalling a moment is also forgetting about ourselves. In these hours while we remember, in fact we arrange our world for good and bad, because to affirm what is good and what is bad is only possible without the person who needs to decide. This is what happens during remembering.
I made one more conclusion after I'd finished this novel. I discovered that writing is an amazingly similar process: the imagination thinks it recalls something from the past, however I know, it never happened (leastwise like I wrote it down), but this is only an insignificant difference. Actually I create memories, which move into the territory of the so-called "real memories" (I’m convinced this is the reason of the past tense in narrative texts). After all, with this theory I confessed the personal reason why I had to research the processing of memories.
But nobody should forget the fact, when people think that they remember to a certain event of the past it is nothing but the creation of their mind which collects the details and gives the most comfortable shape to them. The collecting depends on the emotive relation of the mind to the event. This is the very reason why it requires responsibility; remembering just as much as writing.
But how can we take responsibility while we are not fully aware of ourselves? I have no answer, but it reminds me of the problem of time again, that we try to define the unit of time without a watch, knowing that it is only our private imagination, since time is not touchable nor visible, and the guess often relates to a unit of time that we spent without self-reflection, and after all we will say: I spent two and a half hour with writing. Just like now.
So it doesn’t matter how much I was fighting against the reality, my personal experience proved that reality happens to us, it undeniably exists but we are puzzled about it, therefore we try to make distance from it in our mind to see it clearly, or we bring it close if is too far to understand. So we test it, we repeat it, we make it move. My personal strategy in this fight is to learn the nature of time, the hours, which I spend unwittingly – to reflect on the unreflected.