Muses Discussion Thread [Nov 4th: Mnemosyne]

The visualization of being in that white place and trying to feel what is happening. I have never felt so strongly from any other movie clip, but this perfectly reminds me of how it feels to try to look with my intuition. When I was younger, as I would try to use intuition to look into my past lives and try to look into my future.

But also reminds of something I do not think about much of being a very young child in school. Any time it would be mentioned something like what is your favorite number or what is your favorite color, I would never have some basic answer like the other children as if they are guessing or just picking anything randomly. I would always try my hardest to use my intuition, to look through into my mind with my psychic vision and try to pull from psychic knowledge outside of myself to see what is actually the correct answer. I decided numbers like 9, 36, 27, and 97 not as a number by itself but as the combination of 9 and 7. I felt all of these very strongly. These are not numbers related to dates in my life or anything like that, and at that age I did not even know the interesting things mathematically about these numbers like 9 is 3^2 or 36 is 9x4 or 27 is 3^3. I only knew addition and subraction then. I did not know why 9 or 7 was important. But I knew that it was true and there was something energetically powerful about these numbers because when looking with psychic sense into my intuition, I could feel it.

Around the same age, I was allowed to decide what color to paint my bedroom. I did not choose my favorite color because my favorite color is black and they said that is not allowed because they couldn't paint over it in the future. So again I looked through my mind with psychic vision into my intuition. I focused very hard. And I chose mostly green and with also some red. Red was my 2nd favorite color, and green is fine but I would not call it one of my favorites at that age. When I looked into my intuition with strong focus, I saw these electric lights like a neon sign or flashes of lightning. And what I saw was mostly this green shade, and also some red. I knew it was important. At that age I did not know. But in the future, what I feel as the strongest planetary forces within my soul is Venus energy extremely strongly, and also some Mars but not nearly as much. And these colors that my intuition showed me from the future and that I chose were the same as representations of these planetary energies that I did not know about at that age.

Thank you NP Karnonnos and NG Astrid!

This clip feels so mysterious and alien, you don't know what to expect but we go into it, but knowing the Linguistics professor (Louise) has built a rapport with the extraterrestrial species (Heptapods) and learned to communicate with them and that's how we find out that they need help from humanity in the future... She averts a global conflict because their translated term for "tool" was misinterpreted for "weapon", and ultimately they help her unite humanity.

Her child isn't born yet, but she embraces fate, knowing the heartbreak and joy that lie ahead and chooses to walk that path anyway, accepting time as an interconnected circle...

This is such a profoundly beautiful film and I find it so fitting for learning about memory ❤️

Even the opening monologue of the film has memory in the second line:

“I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing. It doesn't work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.”

This comes as she reflects on her previous human understanding before learning the Heptapod's language, the learning which changes her, it truly strikes a chord in me 🙏

I had a lot of false memories up until I was 22/23 years old. Most of them are now forgotten from my brain.

I also have "phonetic memory" that relates to the goetic names which is why I connected to them so deeply and passionately. I used to vouch for the goetia so hard and at some point I tried to relate people to it but I was unsuccessful.

Thank you for this exercise, NP Karnonnos!

This movie came to mind for me about memory very blatantly, it's about memory and how language is central as a tool or 'weapon' (which the heptapods later mistakingly (?) refer to language as in the film).

Dr Louise Banks is a linguist, one of the best that the government works with because she understands the implications that culture or other nuances may have for the entirety of an effort at communication. When the heptapods arrive on earth she is tasked with deciphering their language, which in the visual representation form I found out are called Logograms, which is used in some writing systems like the English ampersand (&), Ancient Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and Chinese (Hanzi):

Logograms are single written characters, symbols, or signs that represent a whole word or a meaningful unit of language (morpheme), rather than a sound.

Their writing is visually very circular which corresponds to their circular experience of time. This turns out to be the ""weapon"" which they hoped to share with humanity, but the use of this mistranslated word causes a lot of confusion and apprehension with other world leaders. By teaching Dr Banks this language, despite all her fear and disorientation, she begins to experience time in the way that they do, fundamentally transforming how her brain processes time. Non-linear, past-future-present all happening simultaneously. There are theories of language which also suggest that our understanding of the world/experience of reality could change based on what we are able to perceive through the language lens we have.

We see through 'flashes into the future' (which an initial watch may have us falsely assuming are flashbacks, but technically this is all beginning to happen all at once) that she is able to prospectively change the future through her 'memories' and stops a foreign General from declaring war and launching an attack against the heptapods due to the 'weapon' misunderstanding, just in the nick of time. She recalls an event in the future where she meets the foreign General at an event and he thanks her for stopping him, saying that he doesn't know how she somehow knew the contact number to his private phone and was able to speak his wife's dying words to him. This confuses her, but she realises that it was all meant to happen, as he begins to tell her what these were, so she is now able to go back to the present and 'fulfil' the cycle based on her memory of this future event.

The scene in the clip above depicts her 'memories' of a future daughter who will someday die of an incurable disease (we see it before she is even born). Dr Banks is completely changed in her fuller understanding, it doesn't change her path. For her, all the hope, love, fear, and grief happens simultaneously and she proceeds, it is tragically worth it. A different choice could completely erase all the beautiful memories of Hannah's existence (her daughter, whose name is a palindrome, a reminder about circular time) just as much as the sad memories, and it would be easy to view her choice as futile from a limited understanding. In the book, 'Story of Your Life' , however, it is not so much out of her own free will and it carries more of a deterministic/fated view where she finds herself at peace with everything as a part of a wider 'forest' with all the trees in all the 'necessary' facets of her life all in view.

The shared clip is at a particularly disorienting point in the movie when her sense of time is beginning to adapt to the heptapod's non-linear language, as she remembers flashes of her future daughter as her memories become more cyclical. Her fear of the unknown, being in such proximity to the aliens, is not stronger than her determination to do what is right, I can't help but feel admiration for her character in this situation, she is contending with saving the whole world and the heptapods at the same time as confusingly coming to terms with re-experiencing/remembering her future grief for her daughter and also finding out about her daughter, the fate of her daughter, and her own new abilities.

I think the question of what would happen if humanity really had this ability/knowledge could be answered by the question Dr Banks asks of her colleague Dr Ian Donnelly, and his reflections, at the end of the movie:

Louise: If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?

Ian: Maybe I’d say what I feel more often. I… I don't know.

(He looks up at the sky)

You know, I've had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember. You know what surprised me the most? It wasn't meeting them. It was meeting you.

Louise: (Hugging him) I forgot how good it felt to be held by you.

[Her memory skips forwards through time to them being married]

Ian: You wanna make a baby?

Louise: Yes. Yeah.

This ability (to think comprehensively about time, non-linearly) highlights to me about the teachings of the reordering of the Titanic forces by Father Zeus in the myths of Prometheus, Epimetheus and Pandora, which highlights the flaws in our thinking if we maintain a limited or one dimensional view of the world. At this point of the movie, Louise and Ian have only been colleagues and Louise says she "forgot" how good it felt to be held by him although this is the first time they actually embrace, she remembers it all even as it is yet to come. This is significant because despite the couple divorcing in the future (he divorces her when Hannah is still young, for not disclosing that Hannah will pass away) and all the hard feelings that Louise is aware of which are yet to come, she will proceed with their sweet and touching love story regardless, which will also give birth to Hannah and the full cycle of her life. Her efforts will also go on to someday help the heptapods, whose own purpose in sharing these abilities with humanity, which they tell Dr Banks, is because their civilisation will come to need humanity's help in 3000 years.

In terms of memory, her own remembrance of everything all at once, through her experience of non-linearly natured time through her language comprehension, helps her to see, in totality, all the significance of her life and the events within it for what it will birth and the sacredness of all the memories she will have/has had in all her being and choices. This is a powerful way to represent the power of memory, as it reminds the average person (who is prone to self-deceit by forgetting all the complexity of what life truly is) that we oftentimes are deprived of the full picture 'forest' by fixating on the singular and incomplete tree.

"[...] ever keeping memory apart from mind-harming deception,

holding together all the mind that dwells within mortal souls,

strengthening the powerful, steadfast reasoning of mortals,

most sweet, loving wakefulness, bringing all things to remembrance,

whatever each one has entrusted as understanding within the breast,

never turning aside, awakening the mind in all [...]"

- Hymn to Mnemosyne

Question: What does the clip make you feel?

Answer: The music was a little terrifying for me, also in the end i was little scared

What do you think is most important to memorize?

Faith and the connection through which it becomes personal to you. A prayer, a teaching, a simple phrase whose meaning you have taken time to understand. Something you can return to when your circumstances make everything else difficult to hold onto.

The connection to your inner Daimon or to the Gods, an unwavering faith that helps you gather yourself and take the next step.

Thank you VT and Ritual Leads for today's discussions, all of them have been so interesting. I also want to link here NG Arcadia post about Memory in Media - Blade Runner. And mine Memory in Media - Interstellar.