OK, these are the threads I need to tie together: being back from vacation, my daughter’s wedding, and one year on this job. Too much for one blog isn’t it?
OK, here are some wedding pictures. My son Gleb made an entire DVD with movies and slide shows, if anyone cares to see it. It was actually a lot of fun, mainly because Maria and Alexander did not want it to be too formal, and too planned ahead (smart kids). They held their expectations open and vague, so there was no disappointment, but a lot of improvisation. We were incredibly lucky with the capricious Seattle weather. Weddings are just so hopeful and so optimistic; they charge up everyone involved, and help renew people’s relationships.
We form major memories by coding them with emotion. Those events without an emotional coloring quickly fade away, reduce to a bare minimum or to nothing. This is how we keep the storage capacity of our brains available for new memories. However, memories colored by strong emotions tend to stay much longer, and thus become significant in helping to explain the stories of our lives. Rituals such as weddings are simply cultural methods of infusing memories with emotion. We make ourselves remember certain events and give them more significance. A good ritual is an emotional one, hence the songs, the readings, and processions. Then, of course, every culture has a way of periodical recalls of significant events, when people activate their memories and verify them against each other’s.
In reflecting my one year on the job, I see the same pattern: many events I cannot recall at all, others are reduced to a stub of a memory. Sometimes, inconveniently, the important decisions and agreements cannot be recalled at all, so I need to search Outlook. Thanks god for e-mail that remembers all the boring stuff. However, other memories are right here, available for recollection on demand, with vivid details and attendant feelings; I will have them many years from now. In sum, the year’s memories add up to something very good for me. I have met and got to know many wonderful people, managed to get a few things done, had a lot of fun, and many opportunities to think and be creative. Isn’t that what life is all about? Among regrets, I have not been writing much of anything besides these blogs, and made a few mistakes on the job. Let’s not get into details here, OK? So, it is great to be back, even though there is always catching up to do.
Academia as a habitat
I have been writing this blog since 2006. In 2024, I created another blog called "AI in society" . This one will return to postings about life in academia and personal musings.
Two points:
ReplyDelete1. RITUALS AND MYTHS
Anthropology says every ritual has a myth behind it whether we collectively remember the myth or not and every myth, which deals with how a particular mythical hero dealt with/ resolved in a pioneering way a universal, existential dilemma, has a corresponding ritual. Rituals again corroborate the principle of the ontogeny repeating the phylogeny. It is captured in the lines of a film lyric in Tamil: 'Millions have lived through this experience and we are today one of of the epics'. Yes, these ritual experiences remind us that we are also a link in the chain of generations. I murmured these lines (of course, in the version of the original language-Tamil)when I was giving away my daughters in wedding.
I have dug out and found with a sense of deja vu that the myth behind a Hindu wedding ritual is a derivative of the Buddha's existential dilemma about rejecting the paternal role, a universal problem for the human male. the English poet Byron succinctly captures it in his line 'Women are angels, wedlock is the devil'!
It is well known that prince Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, renounced the world, leaving behind his wife,new born son and kingdom (he was about to be coronated the next morning as the king), on the threshold of fatherhood, took to wandering around in search of the singular, primary cause of suffering and attained enlightenment after six long years.
A poignant episode in his running away from his palace and paternity is his visiting his wife who had just delivered a baby boy and wanting to have his son in his arms before tearing himself away from this paternal relationship which he deemed was a bondage.He desisted from doing so lest he should wake up his sleeping wife who would stand in the way of his going away.
The Hindu pre-wedding ritual is called,'Kasi Yatra': it is 'one way' pilgrimage to Benares, the most sacred of cities for Hindus from time immemorial to this day. The ritual consists of the bridegrooom-to-be donning the attire of a renunciate, and proceeding with resolve-- of course, in ritual simulation(!)--not to enter matrimony.
He is supposed to have reached this resolve thanks to his saturation with vedantic wisdom during his earlier phase of residential education in the forests (the only mode of education then) which says all pleasures and enjoyments are illusory and wedding is a trap for a male designed to lure him away from moksa, liberation from the cycles of birth and death, normatively upheld as the ultimate destiny of man in the theodicy of all native Indian religions.
He is intercepted by the father of the bride and he beseeches the bridegroom to enter the phase of householder,give life to his daughter, sire children, rear them up, thus perpetuate his pedigree,and take to the wandering way of life leading to renunciation after he sees his son's son.
I have argued that this ritual is an anticipatory ritual neutralisation of the impulse for desertion of the mate and the offspring, on the part of the male, for which the Buddha was a prototype.
I have adduced wide range of evidences: clinical,biographical, cross-cultural and, of course, this ritual in support of my hypothesis that this is a universal but gender-specific and andro-centric phenomenon.
It originated as a paper I presented in the X World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City,Mexico, in a session on Sexuality, Gender and Alienation 1982 and eventually became my doctoral thesis.
2.MEMORY
To simply: Our psyche consists of an unconscious, inaccessible layer and a conscious layer. The latter consists of memory and a meta-cognitive awareness of this memory.Though seldom human beings are able to filter out memory sediments and get pure, crystal clear consciousness anyone who has had an existential awakening--that is, any normal human being who is past his adolescence--can readily distinguish between memory and the consciousness which is the medium through which memory reaches us awareness. As you said memories charged with emotions stick and others drain away.Painful memories stick longer than pleasant ones. I have a hypothesis that the human psyche is designed asymmetrically--to retain painful memories much longer than pleasant ones.
There is the problematique of memories of events that continue to influence our lifestyles mood states and decisions but which are not accessible to us.Whether they are pleasant or unpleasant or traumatic the relationship between memory and consciousness is turgid, viscuous and turbulent.
All the major native religions of India--Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism-- are one in making consciousness as the locus of an individual's identity and in looking upon memory as adventitious to our identity. In fact the whole range of technologies of salvation/ liberation evolved in India--yoga,meditation,penance etc., are all designed to restructure the relationship between memory and consciousness-- from being turbid, viscious and turbulent, towards transparency of consciousness vis-a-vis memory,positive or negative, pleasant, unpleasant or even traumatic.
If we make memory adventitious to consciousness don't we become non-entities, 100 billion monotonous monads without identity?
No, we don't expunge memory from consciousness but we render it less powerful than consciousness. Instead of consciousness being weighed down,gripped and eclipsed by sediments of memory consciousness becomes master of memory.
I have become too long. Will resume it and write about it in my blog Blogger.com drajaganesan@rediffmail.com, weaving together relevant material from various popular articles, columns,book reviews I wrote.