2006-04-09

Wax philosophe

My back is in knots and my feet are dry and hot. Suffering, mightily, bodily - is present. The weekend passed in fits of alcohol and little sleeps. And now there is the indefatigable torpor that is Sunday night: The Simpsons, Family Guy, and the wishing I was somewhere I am not, and all its subtle variations - that you are here, the time we slept in the car and the stars above, of motion and travel and longing, always longing, for those transitive moments, unnoticed, at first glance, that defined eras passed (and they are various, and they are many.)

I came here to write about something instead of nothing, and now I can see that this is not going to happen. Instead there are these globs of unsubstantiated feeling muted in words, glib perhaps, but without direction, and directionless is something I am trying to avoid in life now.

So I will talk about the most interesting thing I read on the weekend. It is about a people in Sumatra, the Creech, who have the most interesting existential paradox I have ever encountered on paper. This all comes to us via Paul Theroux, the travel author I have been reading of late. These people, these Creech, fashion of their tribe a member to serve as the Memory Priest of their entire culture. A male is born into the role and groomed from the outset to be a repository of countless facts and genealogies; he is their entertainer as well as their historian, and his life the record of all disputes and arguments and gossip and backstabbing that befits a people blessed of the only reliable method of whitewashing such history, for:

'What the Memory Priest knows, the immensity of his storehouse of facts, is nothing compared to the one fact that he does not know, a secret that is withheld from him in the conspiratorial silence of the entire population: that after thirty years have passed...a meeting is convened, he recites the Creech history, and at the conclusion of this he is put to death, and finally roasted and eaten by every member of the Creech, a ritual knows as the Ceremony of Purification.'

~ Paul Theroux, Fresh-Air Fiend

It seems these people are prone to irresponisble behaviour, and at a certain point, thirty years apparently, it all gets to be a bit much to have this fellow around, this living proof of all you've done wrong, and so, naturally, they kill and eat him. If you can't live with your sins then you must live without them; rather than moderate future behaviour, the Creech instead moderate their history:

'...it is the death of the Memory Priest that the Creech people live for and whisper about, the wiping out of all debts, all crimes, all shame and failure, and so they eagerly anticipate the amnesia his death will bring. Throughout his life, though he is unaware of it, less a supreme authority than a convenient receptacle into which all the ill-assorted details of the Creech are tossed, he is secretly mocked for not knowing that it will all end in oblivion, at the time of his certain death.'

~ Paul Theroux, Fresh-Air Fiend

Fascinating, no? Imagine: they have set up a society that functions much like an alcohol induced blackout. During a blackout, though you may be able to walk or talk like the rest of the animals, your brain is unable to turn short-term memory into long-term memory; in essence, you are alert but unconscious (and possibly without conscience). Without memory, without the ability to later reflect on present actions, there is no implicit sanction against almost anything. Indeed, some very dubious acts have been committed by the walking talking blackout - everything from jokes taken too far all the way to homicide. It's like the phrase, 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas', except that, if you were to kill someone during a blackout, that person does not remain in Vegas (unless...nevermind) and you go to jail (unless...well, you probably do actually) - there is no Ceremony of Purification where history begins anew.

It just seems so dangerous, so fraught with temptation, the weeks leading up to this Ceremony. It must be bedlam in the hills of Sumatra. You have 10 days left to lie, cheat, steal, assault! There will be no consequences after that time. You will face only the short-term consequences of indiscerning action. There is no moral restraint. How did such a system evolve? I don't know, but I can't stop thinking about it. Those last days of recorded history...they are like some grand social experiment that highlights the nature of human interaction in a game theory without punishment. When history dissovles, everyone goes back to zero; a line, or sentiment at least, from the movie Fight Club.

What would you do today if you knew that tomorrow was no consequence? Is it because there is a tomorrow, or the illusion of it at least, that we behave exactly as we do?

I leave it to you to mull over. My back needs sleep.

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