I've been struggling with my memory pretty much my whole life. It's probably an ADHD thing: my brain, it seems, have trouble trying to decide whether something is important or isn't, and then it has trouble deciding where to store the relevant memory. When it's working well, the memory is stored somewhere safe and I can then recall it a moment's notice. There's no way to tell if this is what happened, or if the memory has slipped away from me entirely without me knowing. There were more than a few occassions when I thought I have my memory stored safely, but when I reached, figuratively, for the shelf in my storage, I found nothing in it. All I got was a reminder of how unreliable my mind can be, how often it lies to me.
Sometimes I think about that xkcd comic, titled "ADD". It shows a person and the tasks they have to do as a multitude of baloons flying up to the sky. I run after one, and then I run after another one, and then I see one flying too high up so I have to let go of what I have held to catch that, and then I look up and it's hundreds of balloons, all flying away from me, and well well well, if it isn't my entire life. Things, memories, thoughts, simply flying away from me, no matter how hard I try to keep them afloat.
I write a lot to compensate, obviously. Notes, to-dos, journaling, twitter. Oh I love twitter. Previously if I have a funny thought I'll just let it die but nowadays I kinda latch on to it and rearrange it in a way so I can post it. It's nice that I have people reading them nowadays, but even back before that it was a fine place to just throw my thoughts and run and maybe look back in a few months or years or so.
But note how I had to "latch on" to the thought. Writing, putting my thoughts into words, takes up a non-zero amount of energy. And while a thing is unwritten, there's no way to ensure that it will last unless I consciously hold on to it, grip it, not let it out of my sight. That takes up energy too. I am constantly haunted by the idea that none of this is worth it. Why expend the energy to preserve some tiny, probably insignificant thought? Why suffer to preserve a memory?
Maybe it's just greed. To forget is a natural part of life. As I go further into my late twenties, I can feel my childhood memories slipping away. I'm forgetting what it's like to be a child. I understand now why adults don't know what it's like to be children anymore, despite all adults being children once. Our minds are built to be fallible, just as our bodies will one day degrade and die.
Is that something worth fighting against? Haha, honestly, I'm an advocate for constantly finding ways to transcend our mortal limitations, as much as we can. But for all that effort, I sometimes think, it may not be worth it for a funny joke I remember once. Maybe not for a stray feeling of happiness. Maybe not for a grief that reminds you of the kindness of someone you used to know. Pick your fight; know which mortal limits you're fighting this time.
But what an exhausting, suffocating life it is, having to fight only for your survival. I have been there, a time where I wake up and do the things I have to do merely so I can wake up the next day and do the same. The only thing that kept me going was the memory of not doing that: of the small moments of happiness, of the inconsequential memories that nevertheless remind me there was a time other than this. If I did not try to preserve it, if hundreds, thousands of people don't try to preserve those, what will remind me, us, that life is not merely about survival? That life is a thousand different things, a thousand different emotions, separated only by time and space.
And that's why art are important, to me, personally. Because our minds are infallible, we put things down into other forms. Sometimes it's plain writing, but words can't always convey what we want to put down. So we draw. We make music. We make up stories. We put ourselves, knowingly or not, into fiction. Art is how we preserve the memories we cannot trust our minds to keep.
Sorry, this post got personal real quick, but I actually wanted to talk about the Arknights story, Zwillingstürme im Herbst. Zwillingstürme is one of the longest single stories that Arknights has told and it tackles a lot of things: a country recovering from a tyrant, young adults grappling with the legacy of their fathers, etc. It's also about the role of art in the struggle against mortal limitations.
I kept this one screenshot when I first read the story about a year ago. As far as poetry goes, it's not a very pretty line, but it struck me. "Grief and joy may happen only in certain moments of our lives, but we can always feel them, all the time."
Arturia is a character obsessed with finding the "melody" within every lives, and playing the music that is a person, all before they cease to exist (as all being does). Her music, with the "magic" unique to the world, can make people relieve the moments associated with them. Quite literally a moment in time preserved into a piece of art.
Well this sort of magic doesn't quite exists in our world, but I believe that our works of art has much the same value. Art is a moment of grief or joy that not only can survive the passing of time, but can also be shared among different people. It's a way to remind ourselves that life stretches beyond the single point of Here and Now.
In a way, nothing lasts forever, not in the same shape. But with struggle, and effort, everything can last. We can try to make something last.
