Memory and Word

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)