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Murat Germen – “Oblivion” Ancient Antalya At Present
Memory is a concept necessary to maintain existence. What gathers in memory is later converted into a body of knowledge we call experience, guiding our stance in life, our reactions, and our instincts.
Recollections on the personal scale is called memory; on a communal and national scale, it is rather called history. Both are redeeming concepts. Individuals and societies remember what they like and forget what they don’t, even pretending they never happened. “Human memory is marred with oblivion” is a saying that implies humans are inclined to forget uncomfortable truths in order to go on living.
It is possible to connect states of forgetting to the concepts of custody and betrayal. Things in our custody are remembered almost eternally as they are “bigger” than individuals, loved and respected. Betrayal, on the other hand, is a conscious effort to willfully forget, involving the legitimization of despising others and regarding them as “small” in order to gain access to power or to survive.
Forgetting what’s in your custody may knowingly or unknowingly lead to betrayal.
Today, due to the speed and competition forced upon us, we have come to forget sharing / giving / helping, making do, modesty, politesse, elegance, simplicity, thrift, becoming smaller, and protecting what is in our custody; instead, we seem to have taken up endless growth, waste and excess, vanity, taking without giving, a loud tastelessness, crudity, cruelty, hypocrisy, insult, victimization, evilness, and betrayal.
Such oblivion must lead to a revolt for every individual, or else we are surely doomed.
Nature can remember its own systemic structure and regenerate it; but humans, due to their endless greed, forget the internal structure of the system they belong to, degenerate it instead of regenerating it, and thus cause the demise of their own kind.
The only war humans cannot win is the one waged against nature, sublime and indestructible; they will win when they lose…
Murat Germen
