Remembering the past

 If there is a memory that haunts you, do you wish that it could be erased ? If we choose to delete memories that we cannot live with, what will become of us ? Given a chance to restore the deleted memory, would you want it ? Are we not the sum of all our experiences?

Our memories are the memories of what we remember from the past. When I remember some happenings from the past, I am aware that it is a memory of what I remember from the past. It may not be all that accurate but it is what I choose to remember. In order to move on, the optimist in me is inclined to let the bad experiences slide and not dwell on them and tell myself it is what it is, sometimes things happen and there are no answers. Over the years, I have learnt that bad moments pass just as the good ones. When we succeed in doing something, it merely reminds us that we can do it and nothing more. When we land ourselves in some situation that we think we could have avoided if we had thought it through , we do not have to beat ourselves about it. We must be kind to ourselves just as we must be kind to others, What is done cannot be undone, we cannot reverse the past hence we can only keep going. As I age, I know I am still not getting wiser but it is okay. As trite as it sounds, life is work in progress.

Tell me an Ending , a debut by Jo Harkin is a thought- provoking science fiction that is premised on the theme : What happens if something had happened and you could not possibly live with it? Imagine there were this clinic called ‘ Nepenthe where the doctors could administer a procedure that would erase the unwanted memory, would you sign up for it ?

Nepenthe has two types of clients: self-informed and self-confidential. The former knows that they had the deletion procedure but not the latter, that is to say, they choose to erase the act of memory deletion.

In Tell Me an Ending a debut by Jo Harkin, there are four characters who have had gone through such a procedure at Nepenthe .

At the clinic, Noor, a psychologist will assess the mental wellbeing of the client after the deletion procedure. However there is no assessment if you choose to delete the memory of the Nepenthe procedure.

Oscar Levy does not know who he is, he keeps running and he has loads of money to allow him to flee from destination to another but he has no idea what he is running from. He knows that someone is following him so he thinks that he must have done something bad in the past because he keeps having a scratch memory of him holding a gun. He runs from Budapest to Marrakech and finally he is brought back to Heathrow. A driver picks him up and sends him to the clinic.

Oscar turns out to be one of the clients whose removal procedure has been successful but there are adverse consequences. When he was twenty-one years old, he had volunteered himself for the clinical trial to remove part of his memory. The memory that he has erased is to do with his parents’ tragic road accident resulting in their deaths before his eyes when he was a young kid. After he has had his memory deletion, Oscar can’t remember anything at all before he was about sixteen, but he starts having traces of memories of being seventeen and hanging out at his friend’s house. He was at a boarding house for rich kids.

Sixteen-year-old Mei is experiencing traces of a memory. The first of Mei’s memory traces came to her a month ago when she was having scrambled egg on toast for breakfast and the second time was in the shower a week later. She is now with her dad in Kuala Lumpur. She has a trace of a place and she wonders where that is. The traces repeat but they do not develop into anything. Then one of her apps suggests that Katya, someone she has deleted, is a friend. Katya’s profile picutre shows her beside their other friend Sophia and a shoulder that Mei is sure is her own, with a sunny park in the background. She contacts Katya who cannot believe that Mei has no memory of their trip to Amsterdam.

William used to be a police officer. He is suffering from PTSD. He has traces of a memory of an accident involving a young person’s death. As a police officer he would not be allowed to get memory wipes of cases he had personally worked on. But the memory that has been deleted does not fall into any of those categories. William and Annetta has been seeing Marian Dunlop a therapist who talks to them about Nepenthe.

Marian Dunlop says to Annetta.

‘Nobody really remembers events accurately. Even in a wider sense : we tell a story of ourselves, and edit our memories so they fit that narrative. If the story we decide to tell changes, the memories change, We see memory as creating the self, but the self that’s created looks back and changes the memory.’

Finn is married to Mirande. Every now and then he has flashes to a memory about his wife and David who is a surgeon. and a friend of theirs. He thinks David is not just a friend to Mirande. He thinks Mirande has a memory erasure.

The story is narrated through the stories of these four characters and the psychologist, Dr Noor Ali.

After experiencing traces of a memory , some of the former clients of Nepenthe claiming to be self-confidential sue Nepenthe and the court has ordered that their clients must be offered the opportunity to restore deleted memories. Doctor Louise, who has full knowledge what these clients have deleted try to contact clients like William not to restore the memory that he has deleted. Louise is against restoration of a deleted memory.

Nepenthe has a regional clinic in Crowshill, outside London. The design of the facility looks sci-fi good. When Dr Louise interviews Dr Noor Ali why she wants to join Nepenthe, the latter says :

‘We’re all coded, we’re all running programs. The goal is simplicity, elegance, orderly cooperation, to produce an effective and bug-free whole. Obviously the human brain is more of a challenge. When you don’t know the operating rules, problems seem impossible to fix. But they aren’t. To understand the underlying system, the rules, like Nepenthe does, and then use them to fix a , a malfunction, in this case a PTSD response – that’s just a ….beautiful concept. Actually I don’t think there’s anything more beautiful than that.

You didn’t mention morality, Louise said.

Well, no, Noor said. Health ,function – those aren’t moral matters. It ‘s not a moral matter when a program isn’t working. It’s a practical one.’

Louise has told Noor that Do No Harm is an impossibility. Her ethos is Do Least Harm.

Before Noor started working at Nepenthe a decade ago , she looked up the meaning of Nepenthe, she discovered that the word came from Odyssey.

‘There was a magical potion called nepenthes pharmakon, a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Helen of Troy got hold of some of it. She used to spike the drinks of veterans of the Trojan War – which she technically started, so it made sense that she’d want people to forget about it. ‘

Tell Me an Ending is a meditation on what makes us humans.

It asks the question : What will we become of us if and when our experiences are taken away from us? How much our experiences define us?

Tell Me an Ending is 525 pages long and it had taken me a month to read it and it had been a busy month for me. Glad to have finished it. The premise of the cautionary tale is thought-provoking and it is an enquiry into what lies in our human mind and if our mind is what being human means. Our mind is fragile and I do not think our mind is all that reliable with all the thoughts that run through it. Its author Jo Harkin had done research when she was writing the book and found that the science referred in her book is real. She concludes that Memory isn’t written in stone: it’s more like a photocopy of a photocopy. In her article in Irish Times , Harkin writes that ‘memories are mutating all the time: merging with other memories, losing parts, gaining new elements, disappearing altogether‘.

I do believe that we do alter our memories to be able to live with them. Everything is a perception and our mind is too fluid to be reliable.

A Perfect Sunday

If you ask me what  my perfect Sunday is, it would be a day I can binge read whatever fictions that I want to read. But for the past few Sundays I had not been able to read leisurely without feeling guilty due to my work. Amidst some urgent work that had to be attended to, I read The Circle by Dave Eggers and Ghosts by Dolly Alderton.

The Circle is a dystopian novel written by Dave Eggers.

Mae Holland is a young graduate and with the help of her good friend, Annie Allerton,  she lands herself a job at the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company. Annie, her good friend from college is the senior executive at the Circle. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, designed with  open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, cozy dorms for employees and a model  image of modernity and technology. The Circle links users’ personal emails, social media profiles,  preferences, their payment systems, banking and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity known as TruYou — one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person for the rest of your life online. Ty, born Tyler Alexander Gospodinov was the first founder who had first invented the system. ‘Ty realized he was, at best, socially awkward, and at worst an utter interpersonal disaster.’ So just before the company’s IPO, he hired Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton,  with them on board, the IPO raised $3 billion. Ty is then free to float, to hide and to disappear.  TruYou is Ty’s innovations but Eamon and Tom who have the business acumen  monetize the innovations. The Circle has changed the internet, in toto. It is about  a new age of civility and transparency where the general public willingly and enthusiastically surrenders the right to privacy. Exchanges are based on social media smiles and frowns (likes and dislikes). With their innovations of SeeChange, lollipop-sized, wireless, real-time video cameras that can be placed anywhere around the globe, ChildTrack microchips that can be embedded in the bones of children, the Circle reigns over data tracking in the name of transparency and eliminating crimes. “ All that happens must be known”, “sharing is caring”, “privacy is theft” and “ secrets are lies” are the  mottos  of the company. In order to get votes, the Circle becomes popular with politicians and in reality , the company’s true intentions is to complete the Circle by making membership and subscription to the Circle mandatory so you can track people from cradle to grave and their lineage.

At the Circle, all employees are expected to be social and they are being profiled according to their personal interests and  preferences which are openly shared between colleagues. Life at the Campus is not only about work, there are  always parties that last through the night, famous musicians playing one the lawn, sporting activities, clubs, brunches for employees to participate for free. Mae finds that not only she gets full medical benefits like everyone else, even her parents’ health insurances are taken care of. As the story progresses,  she is really sold all those concepts that are being developed by the founders and the team. Mae adapts quickly to the fast-paced work culture and environment filled with constant barrage of screens that demand her full attention, she becomes the voice and public face of the Circle who films and record every aspect of her day.

When it becomes apparent that The Circle has become  uncontrollable, Mae, will perhaps, learn too late that the Circle cannot be stopped. She is confronted with a choice to make known the Circle’s true intentions and her power to support or undermine its vision.

Due to her willingness to participate in all the ever-expanding programmes for openness with SeeChange cameras around her parents’ home against her parents’ will, they decide to move away and Mae becomes estranged from her own parents to whom she used to be close. She also angers her ex-boyfriend, Mercer who does not need unsolicited help from Mae who is eager to show him how he can expand his business through the Circle. He tries in every way to flee from all the surveillances but Mae’s competitiveness  will not stop her from trying to convince him to surrender to the tools.

The fiction was published in 2013 and  it  is about the near future. Its theme is akin to what is depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell. Looking at how technology advances, the story in The Circle is not  far removed from what is happening today. We need to think about  the ramifications of the development of such  tools and what these tools might implicate on democracy, privacy and free will. Is it necessary to overshare information when not everyone is equipped with the resources and the ability to analyse let alone verify these information?

Identity is as much fluid as it is  personal. I shudder to think about living in a world where you are constantly being watched and you are compelled  to be on your best behaviour or a behaviour that is regarded by the rest of the world  as normal behaviour. Who gets to be the judge? Can you relax when you walk around knowing that you are being watched through a hidden camera at every minute of the day? Tools and new technology are invented with the best of intentions but when ambition, vanity and monetary gains are in the mix, those with the means and power will make use of the tools and technology to further enrich themselves and become even more powerful and continue to reign and dominate while the rest of the world try to keep up with fast growing technology and our minds made up for us leaving us hardly any options but endeavour to navigate ourselves through ever changing digital landscape.