Memories

Everything starts with memory. And it ends there. And in between is everything else - which has not achieved the status of being remembered. You can also call it - life.

Memories can be cloudy, foggy, clear, reliable, unpleasant or pleasant, pleasant or painful, this or that, but without them - there is nothing. "Life is not what we experienced, but what we remembered," said a great writer.

And all the determinants you put next to the memories are just another chosen word (which you will remember or not, once), and which reminds you that there are no different memories until li - the most personal. Any attempt to standardize memory usually leads to forgetting. To the dangerous forgetfulness of Self. Or - confusion.

Akutagawa's Rashomon (which owes its popularity to Kurosawa) is the most beautifully told story about people and memory. How much is both - unreliable. In the zone of memory, it is as if the rules of quantum physics apply - a kind of indeterminacy principle - as if in that world too - the act of observation (remembering) changes the observed, that is, the remembered...

If, well, some Heisenberg of memory decided to work on such a theory, Montenegro would certainly be his favorite laboratory. Here, you can observe processes that, under normal circumstances, take decades, or even years, in just a few months. Or a week.

I am sure that you also know at least one person, a neighbor, a friend, a schoolmate, a wonderful Montenegrin (there aren't any others, are there) whose sudden loss of memory, or his radical transformation, you witnessed. And as much as it may surprise you, almost everyone you know has a similar experience.

Today he convinces you of one thing, extremely warm, committed, and then, after some party congress, change of statutes, media scandal or campaign behind those in power, the man convinces you with equal conviction of something else, usually completely opposite to what he told you just three days ago.

You know what I'm talking about? This is today's typical Montenegrin - a man who can adapt his own memories (and himself in them) to every political turn, every sudden (historical) bend, as if someone just put a new program in his brain.

Maybe that's not a bad thing, it resembles the mass hysteria at the end of an early Almodovar film: the former Chetniks who today defend Montenegro, like Kerbers, jump at every disobedience, the old leftists who "detached" to blood and soil, the former rightists are now on the left, yes it can't be leftists, former critics of the regime who today are submissive intellectual lambs... imagine, in the end, what kind of slaughter they had to carry out over their own memories, what a sad massacre it was? That memoricide is something whose consequences we are yet to see.

And all this is possible because none of them owns their own memories. They drink new memories like antibiotics, every six hours. These days it is current - "The Audacity of Remembrance". It is, in fact, the title of a large international project led by the Goethe Institute, one of the important facts of German culture.

Namely, that title, "The Courage of Memory", the editor of the magazine "Die Horen", which devoted two issues to this topic, the literary critic Ridiger Boltz explains as follows: "In all countries of the region there is a policy of history, strictly prescribed by the state, including a considerable amount of preset symbols.”

Although it has recently become popular in Montenegro to be reserved towards the authorities from Europe, I cannot disagree with this devastating diagnosis.

The current distributors of memory insist on "their own strength", "an influx of self-confidence", discreet irritation towards "Europeans who come here to brainwash us", and the like... And the Montenegrins, as is well known, have never been brainwashed by anyone, so they are something quite become sensitive to it.

All this actually clarifies the context in which it is even possible for memories to be - bold. Or anything else. They should always be just what they are - pity, whether you like it or not.

Maybe soon the boldness will be even if you let the memories linger. He who remembers is dangerous to the general well-being. Which, it seems, is only possible with us if we all become speechless beings without memory.

In the end, people are cruel to memories in that way. Although it is the only property that you cannot pledge for a loan (although some banks accepted it as a guarantee), memories are the only thing that no one can take away from you.

You can only do that yourself.