In the black holes of memories

Certains images, certain words keep floating in my mind and I want to capture them here. Perhaps it'll make more sense to me when I write them down. If not, at least I recorded them when they existed.

It's an old tale that if you dig a hole in a tree next to a river, you can whisper your deepest secrets and seal the hole with earth. That way, you will have gotten rid of your secret forever. The secret will travel down to the ground, and make its way to the river and be washed away. I don't know the details of how it is supposed to work. I'm surprised that trees next to rivers aren't all dead yet. Very very few people must believe that this works.

This story didn't stick very well in my mind until I saw a variation of it in a movie. At the end of the movie, the man finds a hole in the wall of an old temple, whispers into it and seals the hole with earth. I see him pressing his face to the wall often these days. It doesn't work for any temple -- the temple was a special one with its own legend. But you see the point is really whispering into a hole.

I wonder about people with such great secrets to bear. I speak too soon. It will be me someday with something I want banished forever. Meantime, I take life as it comes with all the bittersweet happenings, until it breaks me.

There was an interesting variation on the removal of memories in the recent Harry Potter movie (Goblet of Fire). I can't believe I'm mentioning pop culture here. Anyway, Dumbledore removes his memories for safekeeping, so that he can look at them in the future and see all the details. He keeps everything, although I see only the saddest memories. He looks back at them to try to understand and learn from the past.

The two sources are very different, so it would sound weird to compare Dumbledore and the Buddha. But for a moment I wondered who is wiser. The one who allows others to throw memories away, or the one who stores everything to learn from his past? It is obvious that I can't compare the two. The Buddhist tale (as far as the tales are concerned, there is a Buddhist link) allows the suffering mortals to cast away their pain so that they can go on. After all, one must learn to let go. But then for the living man who is eons from enlightenment, I would rather that he learns from his past so that he does not repeat his mistakes. One day perhaps, he will find that there is no need to cast away his pain because they have already vanished.

The past does not matter. For now, there is that black hole, and more mortal suffering.