An octogenarian member of our family has been behaving in a
manner that is symptomatic of early Alzheimer
disease. His anterograde memory( he
fails to create memory) seems to be failing whereas his retrograde memory( he
can recall his past) is more or less intact.
His case offers a striking similarity with the protagonist of Umberto
Eco’s celebrated novel ‘The mysterious Flame of Queen Loana’ in which the
central character suffers a cerebral stroke that results in losing his anterograde
memory. In other words he could recall
his distant past and particularly what he read as he spent much of his time amid books by virtue of
his being an antique book dealer . He
asks his wife what month it is and as his wife replies that it is April, he
goes into a reverie and indulges in soliloquy:” April is the cruellest month
breeding lilacs out of the dead land….’an oft-quoted line from Eliot’s The
Waste Land. He recalls the lines from his past reading of the text whereas he
is quite oblivious of what goes around his immediate present.
The more I get closer or more I talk to this amnesiac member
of our family, the more I get a sense of immediacy and involvement. Besides I
feel increasingly aware of how memory
gives us a sense of continuity. I am Nayan J.Kakoty (aka NJK)-past, present and
future because I have a memory. It is my memory that helps me construct the
narrative of my life. I cannot go back physically to my past as the’arrow of
time’ moves only toward future. But it is
through my memory I am able to go back to my past and relive those days.
Remember Wordsworth’s Daffodils: ‘I
wandered lonely as a cloud that floats
on high over vales and hills/when all at once I saw a crowd/a host of golden
Daffodils beside the lake…’
Wordsworth saw the Daffodils long back in past and now he is
just reminiscing . In other words it is with
the help of his memory Wordsworth is getting an accesses to one of his
edifying experiences that happened in his past. We all carry our past in memory
as Wordsworth says again in Solitary Reaper;”
the music in my heart I bore ,/long after it was heard no more’.
What Happens when there is a suppression of links in the
chain of our memory? Remember what happens when the king forgets about the ring
in Shakuntala? Or just mark the situation Amir Khan finds himself in Ghajni.
The octogenarian member of our family has a novel way of
filling up the gaps in his highly fractured memory. He often confabulates. He
often invents stories that fill up the gap when his memory goes blank. And most
interesting fact is that those
inventions are from his own past experiences.
Memory! What a wonderful piece of work!
Memory is life.
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Why does a word exist? Does it exist for its usages? Or it exists
for its existence in dictionary?
There are many words in our( Assamese) language that are not
to be found in any dictionary. For
example in my day to day life I have often overheard people saying’ Moi khai keni or moi khai pini golu( I went after I had eaten my food). The words like keni or pini (in the context of this use) are not in any Assamese
dictionary. I do not know if the words are just the babbling of a dialect of
Assamese. At least in standard Assamese these words are not found. Neither can
they be used in the context as above.
Recently AASU demanded a Sarbic(Comprehensive)reform
of SEBA(Board Of Secondary Education). But surprisingly the word Sarbic was not in ChandraKanta abhidhan.
Not in Saraighat Abhidhaan either. A friend of mine told me that the word could
be a derivative of Sarba(entire). I looked up and even there too the word could not be found.
In that case it is worth-examining how the word has forged a
path into AASU’s rhetoric.
These words pose the conundrum as mentioned above. Besides
it also underpins the debate if a
dictionary should be prescriptive. Or whether a dictionary should be left alone to describe the language as it is.
( After reading Lynda Mugglestone’s ‘Dictionaries: A very
short introduction published by Oxford University Press)
