mind – Jo Ind https://joind.co.uk Writer, digital media producer, learning designer Sat, 11 Feb 2017 10:52:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://joind.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-Flavicon-Jo-32x32.png mind – Jo Ind https://joind.co.uk 32 32 If I can’t remember it, is it still a part of me? https://joind.co.uk/memory-identity/ https://joind.co.uk/memory-identity/#respond Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:57:24 +0000 http://joind.co.uk/?p=785 I went up to my study last week and screamed. For reasons, that perhaps only a five-year-old can understand, Arch had pulled every one of my books from my shelves and hurled them in a spine-bent, cover-ripped pile on the floor.

So that was how I came to be doing something I had not done for five years, ten years, 20 years in some cases – laying my hands upon my treasures…opening them, smelling them, remembering what I had been doing and who I had been when I had drunk deeply of their meanings.

My books are familiar – yet strange

But as I leafed through these layers of self, I was surprised to find strangeness and familiarity in equal measure.

Take The Continental Philosophy Reader, for example.  I remember buying that from a store in London when I was in my 20s.  I recall how excited I was to have it.

Good grief.  It included Claude Levi-Strauss on the Structural Study of Myth, Michel Foucault on The Discourse of Language and Hans-Georg Gadamer on The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.  Who wouldn’t have been wetting herself?

I don’t understand them

But as I looked through the fat and juicy tome, I realised that some 20 years on, I didn’t understand a word of it.  What ever was it all about? Did I really read that kind of thing just for the Hell of it? Today I can barely read a newspaper.

Yet in the margins of this inscrutable text, were my annotations showing just how much it had meant to me:  “YES!!!!” , “Cf mimesis”, “Cf Rubem Alves”, “Yes, yes, yes!” I got it once. I don’t get it now.

All of which caused me to ponder…where did that thinking go? Is it lost, just because I can’t remember it?  Do the things we can’t recall disappear or have they become a part of us, affecting who we are, at some level creating us, even if we can not trace them?

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