Someplace over a valley of glass and sand,

Beneath cloudless skies and vacuous land,

Lied home to a cairn of stolid and brood,

Wherein sat a watchman of staid repute,

The purveyor of lies, betrayer of truth;

Crusader of will and agent of need,

Memory it’s blade, recollection it’s sheath,

Confounding the weights that would stay our feet,

To the forgettable mass, deep and unseen,

Which make of us more than many may like,

For such is the pyre of the watchman’s plight,

Protectorate to paradise, it’s blinding light,

A war against time, vitiation it’s blight.

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this poem in response to a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning” by psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. In the book Frankl describes his experiences during his three years as a concentration camp prisoner through the lens of psychology, wherein he drew a handful of conclusions and observations that struck me as incredibly profound. Frankl speaks of how people are able to endure unimaginable hardship by allowing that hardship to take preeminence in one’s mind, such that any way of life or past experiences before that hardship is pushed to the back of one’s memory.


This unusual mechanism helps in the survival of one’s humanity, as it disallows those enduring hardship from dwelling on the better times and falling into hopelessness or madness, and instead strips away (thus protecting) the finer aspects of the human condition—love, pleasure, enjoyment, creativity, aspirations, etc—forcing the individual to focus on survival. Complex and vivid dreams of things like friendships, family, beauty, achievement, sexuality, or anything of the sort turn to simple dreams of warmth, edible food, or death. Never did those in the camps dream of freedom, love, or liberation, because those things became unimaginable to the prisoners. The nightmares were inconsequential, as they were never worse than the reality they enveloped.

 

Frankl notes that once his camp was finally liberated, and he was reintegrated into society, he could no longer fathom how he endured the horrors and hardship for three long years, just as it is impossible for someone like you or I to imagine enduring that kind of suffering.

 


Although the mind blocks these traumatic events and experiences from one’s memory, the subconscious effects and impact that trauma has on the individual is not lost. Even though most survivors were able to retain key aspects of their humanity, they were still damaged and skewed irreversibly from their experiences.

 

This brings us to the second aspect of the poem, which is the way memory serves us and vitiates our reality in everyday life. When you recall a memory, you are never recalling the event itself, but rather the last recollection of that memory. This explains how memories degrade over time and become more and more distorted and distant as we get older. The mind also seems to discard 90% of the things that happen in our life, leaving no place in memory for the forgettable mass that constitutes a vast majority of our waking life, and influences our lives more than we realize.

 

For this reason, I regard the mind and memory as the watchman of one’s humanity, the protector of joy that allows us to live in the present and focus on what’s important, even if doing so is to lie and deceive, and become be a vitiator of reality.

 

 


image:

#

March 21, 2019

Leave a Reply

Skip to toolbar