Initiating Memory Lane Program
I have such a strong desire to make sure I record my memories somewhere outside of my brain, knowing just how temperamental and temporal that software is after my experience with amnesia.
I think I’m just scared to forget again.
Maybe I want be remembered.
Be part of the immortality project.
Somewhere on the Internet, there can be a little slice of me which I can visit, and others too.
Eventually, all this can be collated into a book, and stuck on some shelf in the British Library.
I don’t know… I think I’m just scared to forget.
People have asked me what memories came back first, and this was always difficult to answer. For some reason, I remembered that memory was malleable, altered slightly each time you recalled it, filtered through this new version of me and therefore scrutinized and doubted. I became paranoid of my own past, distrusting what I knew like some replicant in Blade Runner.
As Roy says in the original movie, reflecting upon his life before death, “all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
I share his melancholy.
Fragments of memories, of moments that exist in a space and time which require assembly sometimes flash across my mind, more often than not, something unique returns to me because of a sound, or a smell.
Photographs were the main source of my reconstruction.
With their ability to make room on the hard drive of the mind and exist externally, like files on a desktop which can be viewed to access more. Snapshots which are a two-dimensional version of events and act as a time-traveling gateway.
One portrait would transport me to the time it was taken, and although it requires a certain degree if imagination to re-assemble, there was comfort in seeing that I did have a life before.
And yet… I was often unsettled by the knowledge of deep fakes. The ease of photoshop had me suspicious of reality and possible red herrings.
There’d be no reason for some force to keep me confused, apart from Descartes’ Demon who could make me “think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”
However, living in identity limbo was so exhausting and frightening that, even if these memories weren’t mine, it became comforting to slip into a dead man’s shoes. At some point, I simply had to create a past in order to feel whole in the present. Social etiquette requires you to have some sort of background when introducing yourself.
Generally, when one memory came back it would tumble another domino down. When I was in that disillusioned state of mind, matrix-level trickery and the magic of technology has me questioning who I was all the time, and where I was, as in, here and now, yes, but also asleep elsewhere perhaps, or in some machine?
During the Valerian and The City Of A Thousand Planets shoot, production did a 3D scan of my body for computer-generated use, in case it needed to place my character somewhere in their world.
And there was that one time production for another movie I eventually had to turn down created a mould of my head in order to create accurate masks.
You can understand how my imagination further locked me in a place of non-reality and distrust of my environment.
I no longer knew if the face I saw in the mirror was mine.
But it was the one I am wearing, so I grew accustomed to it.
That of my friends and family however… all part of the imitation game, this Truman Show delusion, further digging myself into a hole with memories of other experiences; a TV show where all my responses were fed to me by an artificially-intelligent program to gage the participants’ feedback as they were on a blind date with the Turing test.
Or that one time I was complicit in a convoluted three-week long practical joke that displayed the level of choreography required to manipulate a person into believing a false reality.
In order to escape the ontological and metaphysical frame of mind, the next few journal entries will explore memories I cherish, paying attention to the positive aspects of my past. These past few years of divorce and therapy had a way of bogging me down in taking responsibility for all the negatives and weaknesses, and although an important and valuable endeavor, this had me forgetting the good things that made me who I was… who I am.
Having played the guard to my prisoner, the doctor to my patient, the parent to my child, I think it’s time to now treat myself like a best friend, because maybe during all this, I forgot that Eric is actually pretty cool, a huge nerd, but pretty damn cool.
I remember having fun being me, at being the class clown, the chatterbox and life of a party, and I’d like this aspect of my personality to shine through once more.
Initiating Memory Lane Program.
Thank you for following my story. I invite you to buy me a pizza. Think of me as one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles, this sewer half-shell will always have your back. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Lampaert