kagablog

This is a confessional tale. Yet with the distance of a dozen years between the present and that fateful day, I am able to conceive of myself as a character, as someone who I am not anymore. There he goes, there he flickers, the shadow of myself in time, as if already captured within the all-encompassing and definitive framing of a photograph. But all photos are of ghosts, because there’s no-one there anymore. (How sombre these old films are with their record of the animated bodies of the dead.)

So here’s the thing: on 10 May 1994, when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated by the new dispensation, I went mad for a few hours. I took a holiday from sanity. I took a ride outside of the everyday assumptions we require to keep us afloat and floating the societal boat. More to the point, I became what could later be described with a reasonable amount of accuracy, as a paranoid schizophrenic, and I relate this here for the purposes of science, and in the interests of keeping a record of an experiment.

You see, what had happened, was that only moments before my friend and I joined the cheering crowds gathered on the lawns of the Union Buildings to celebrate the dawning of a new day, we had each consumed a tablet of Ecstasy (MDMA), and a cap of Acid whilst smoking some Malawi cob. Well, it was either this that did it to me, that pushed me over the edge, or it was the flyover of the SADF Air force over the Union Buildings, which I recall experiencing as a distinctly tactile sensation of power changing hands.

Whatever the case may be, this was to be the last thing I remembered for a while, since, the next thing you knew – there I was – ambling about the streets of Sunnyside without a memory. I couldn’t remember my name, or how things worked. I thought that I was either an old man who had lost his memory, or someone who was mad. I wanted desperately to know how systems worked, but was excluded from the knowledge of names and positions. I could recognise a symbol, such as a traffic light (a robot) when I saw it, but I didn’t know what it stood for. I was outside of the circle. To not remember is to be lost.

And God, what a relief it was when the memory came washing back…in waves…how wonderful to put everything back into place…to be able to situate myself in terms of names and places and people and faces, and to realise how I fitted into the network of things. Without memory one is one the outside of the system. Every system requires the memory of its ceremonial processes. Our memories of ceremonial processes are, perhaps, more crucial to our idea of who we are than, say, private memories. Public memories provide places where it’s possible to interface with a community, to represent ourselves to an illusory forum.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all…Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing…
Luis Buñuel (in Sacks: p.22)
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