Connect the Dots # 6
CtD #6 explores the human mind in the context of the three titular ideas. Memory is content-based, a dream is a process and sleep is an activity. These three ideas are explored through different stories/dots for the purpose of demystifying or decoding.
The first dot is a personal response to the novel Ignorance by Milan Kundera which I read as part of the Reading Challenge in Readers’ Rendezvous. The novel offers rich insights into exile and memory. Using the Odyssean tale of homecoming, Milan Kundera weaves a modern tale of nostalgia and personal memory. I was able to identify myself with some of the emotions portrayed in the novel since I too had a brief stay in a land which was far away from my ‘home’. Even today I am living the life of an internal emigrant away from my original home… but little closer.
I was able to make an immediate connection with the opening lines of the novel, Irena’s friend Sylvie asks her,
“What are you doing here? “
“Where should I be?” Irena asked.
“Home!”
“You mean this isn’t my home anymore?”
Kundera himself an émigré from Czech in France has rampantly used the themes of emigration and exile in his works. The novel deals with the return of the two central characters to Prague. Josef from Denmark and Irene from Paris. Irene is accompanied by her Swedish boyfriend. Kundera creates a narrative which oscillates between the lives of Irene and Josef. Irena realizes that people really aren’t interested in her experience of exile. The first chapter ends with the lines – “Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of return”. The second chapter contains an extended description of the word nostalgia as it appears in different languages. Nostalgia in the Greek language is defined as nostos (return) and algos (suffering), is the suffering caused by an unpassed yearning to return. According to Kundera, the stronger the nostalgia the emptier the recollections. The more Odyssey suffered, the more he forgot. Nostalgia doesn’t heighten memory’s activity. The novel’s primary concern is all about memory and forgetting. Josef tells that seeing his old watch on his brother’s wrist “threw him into a strange unease. He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after 20 years”. He describes his mother tongue as an “unknown language whose every word he understood”. The journal which Josef kept during his school days serves as another symbol of memory. He wonders looking at his own handwriting “How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting? Kundera successfully mingles the political strife with the personal alienation and heartbreaks. The Communist regime serves as a background against which the lives of Josef and Irena is explored. The novel is described as ‘a novel of return’. Even though I have finished reading the novel, it is still growing inside me and in the near future, I will prepare an exclusive blog on Milan Kundera’s Ignorance.
The second dot is based on the article which appeared in the NYT on November 15th. The article deals with dreams and it comes with the one-line description – ‘Where your brain goes when you’re asleep helps you when you’re awake’. The article discusses the sad fact about how we disregard our dreams. As we reach adulthood, we go by the age-old wisdom that we shouldn’t ‘dwell on our dreams’. We are given lessons that say that dreams are juvenile, self-indulgent and that we should shake off their traces and get on with our day. The writer Alice Robb who has authored the book – ‘Why we Dream’, talks about how for the past two years she along with her friends meet and talk about their dreams. According to her, there is a way the dreams will sneak into our conscious territory and influence our daytime time mood. She further illustrated the benefits of dreams by describing them as ‘a breeding ground for ideas. Dreams may even help us ‘consolidate new memories and prune extraneous pieces of information’. It is interesting to note that the book by Alice Robb opens with a quote from the novel by Susan Sontag titled ‘Benefactor’. ‘I understand why most people regard their dreams as of little importance. They are too light for them, and most people identify the serious with what has weight. Tears are serious; one can collect them in a jar. But a dream like a smile is pure air. Dreams, like smiles, fade rapidly. But what if the face faded away, and the smile remained?’ (Why we Dream, Alice Robb) The article in NYT which is titled end with the lines – ‘Even in dreams we know who we are.’ You can explore the world of Alice Robb using this link to her blog - https://muckrack.com/alice-robb
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| Source: Google |
The third dot is based on the article which appeared in the August issue of National Geographic magazine. The title as it appeared in the cover page is – Sleep – The New Science of Slumber. The article says that every night of our lives we undergo a startling metamorphosis. The article traces the history of sleep from 350 B.C when Aristotle wrote an article “On Sleep and Sleeplessness” and to the invention of ‘electroencephalograph’ in the year 1924 by the German psychiatrist. The machine records the electrical activity in the brain. The article explores the importance of sleep in childhood development and health. Poor sleep in kids has been linked to diabetes, obesity and learning disabilities. What is most interesting about the article is the description of a performance by the composer Max Richter who has created a minimalist, scientifically informed piece that aims to guide listeners through a rejuvenating rest. It lasts eight hours. The article is a cautionary one which gives the message – A full night’s sleep now feels as rare and old-fashioned as a handwritten letter. It explores the different stages that human beings undergo in their sleep. The stunning description about this journey is ‘a serpentine, surreal descent into an alternative world’
You can watch the musical composition by Max Richter in this link:
What happens to us in our sleep? Are we caught in the interplay between dreams and memory?
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