Rowing across an ocean…that’s how I feel, as though I am rowing across my own private ocean where even fish are rare companions…it is a nice comfort zone…people believe whatever they want to believe, even to the point of absolute absurdity… I admit that I am no exception…but while I row, I can believe what I want and reassure myself about what IS true; what memories are real; what is imagined and what has actually been experienced…it seems that the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century were years of the mind twist: the years of the denial of truth, the rewriting of history, even personal histories and the creation and recreation of multiple selves by others…they were years of constant storms. Waves crashed over us poor human beings, forcing change in some cases, while in others a fierce determination to hold on to one’s identity and memory grew stronger with each false identity they were presented with. Remembering became the only way to preserve the experiences of the past as individuals, organizations and governments sought to erase and rewrite over and over again in fear that they would be discovered or lost…or maybe they did it just for the game, I don’t know…What I do know, is that it happened to individuals, cultures, countries and even the life itself…Some were rewritten as knowledge and technology advanced. Others were rewritten out of envy and maliciousness….its saddest of all when the rewrites were of the identities and experiences of the innocent, particularly of the children…

So, I have repeated the stories to myself in many venues and at many different times. I have turned them inside out, and around and all about watching as the same pieces fall into different slots…but the pieces, the memories, the experiences never change…they are sometimes added to and the twisting and turning has revealed memories or interpretations long forgotten…age has brought with it another view, other ways of understanding what hadn’t been understood…it is disconcerting on some occasions to find the falseness of one’s own self-righteousness-or the rightness of it…how powerful are our thoughts in creating who we are, and how powerful are our fears of the power of others’ thoughts in that same act…

We are malleable and resilient creatures though. Our minds are our allies and our enemies. Our imagination our greatest gift and worst nightmare. As we struggle to know who we are and to hold on to increasing large bodies of data as well as to manipulate that data in favour of our own will, we often feel we are in the ocean, not on its surface. So, yes, rowing across one’s own ocean provides a feeling of control; of independence; of freedom that can never be taken away because there is nothing, nothing that can take away the essential ‘you’ or ‘I’….

Ian Whitney 2007

~ by debussytime on September 29, 2009.