I use to love the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It centres around the Alexander Pope poem of the same name. If you are unfamiliar, it speaks to the pain of remembrance among many other things.
Both the poem and movie express the cry of a lover who holds desire and remembers a love that has past, while the other lover is in a place of forgetting.
In the poem, the spotless mind belongs to the lover who has been castrated and has submitted to a quiet life of forced monk-hood. He is in non-desire and the memory of the intimate and passionate relationship is distant and almost painless.
In the movie, the lover who forgets receives a medical procedure, and as such is able to move on with life and new romance.
In both poem and movie, the lover who remembers is suffers in cyclical turmoil, pain and loss.
The poem and the movie delve into many other intensely beautiful and complicated things. But for most people who love these pieces of art and cinema, there is a specific relatability to remembering. It was so for me as well.
What is our Relationship to Loss & Remembering?
I do still love the movie , but I don’t have the same relatability with it anymore. I think it’s because I have a much different relationship now to loss and what is present.
The anatomy of loss often includes ‘missing’ a person, place, thing or sentiment. Our eyes look at our present and see ‘an absence’ and that triggers the emotions we associate with ‘missing’ or even ‘missing out’. Even if what we miss is a younger, healthier, more innocent, wild and free version of our self.
This starts with looking that the present though.
If in a moment, the present seems full and joyful or even busy, we wouldn’t take that next step and compare it with the past. In this way, our active minds are spotless – present, unattached and perhaps more in flow.
Pain and trauma sit with us way more than joy and delight. It’s likely because we have way more attachments to the former than the latter where we simply ingest the experience and move on.
This knowing for me, lead to a completely different line of questioning around what actually makes me happy, rather than just sitting in sadness of memory.
Sometimes we think we know what will ‘make us happy’, but more often than not, it isn’t sustainable or even entirely true.
Joy, comes from within, so its source is not the outside world, though the outer world can amplify it.
In the poem, I found the castration really interesting; so much of the dance of attraction and repulsion comes from our hormones and balance within the endocrine system. Removing the key component of the male sexual hormone, on one hand ‘frees’ him from a lifetime of pain and despair, but on the other hand, makes him docile and more amenable to doing what he is told by the religious orders in the poem.
In the movie, the procedure erases the entire memory of the relationship through the conscious and unconscious mind.
So, of course, none of us want to be in pain and loss; so the question becomes, why the desperate need or want to have it extracted? Is it just so we are free of pain?
This is highly personal question and one answer will not fit with any one person, or even the same person in different scenarios with different intensities of pain.
If your tooth hurts, you may not give it a second thought when you get it extracted.
But, if it someone you love is in incredible physical pain with no end in sight, there is no easy extraction here.
This is where the human lives - at the crossroads of impossible answers, conflicting ideals, opposing philosophies and a winding paths.
In the Buddhist tradition, we are in pain and suffering when we try to hold on to someone or something, or even if we just get used to a certain way of being.
This inquiry within of our relationship with loss and how we truly handle it, how we experience remembering then becomes a deeply intimate quest of self-realization.
Where All Rivers Lead…
When we remember, we may cry a river of tears.
Those rivers across space and time lead to a single ocean.
Sometimes, remembering just that can be enough.
Not enough to stop the tears or ‘fix’ a situation so we feel better.
But enough to realize our human-ness and that of others.
Perhaps it is enough to remind us to accept the journey, the path, the time and choices of others, not making everything about filling our own emotional voids.
Remembering that we are loved and supported, that we are working towards and goal or intention, or simply recalling a past joyful memory can actually serve us really well, if we let it.
Remembrance can give us the guidance and empathy we need.
It can ground us and activate new perspectives.
It can nourish and reconnect us, getting us ready to flow with what is present for us right now.
Remembering someone who is no longer here can evoke joy and wonderment, like thinking about what they may do in the present moment, what they may say, or how they may interact with you.
Perhaps the spotless mind, is actually the luminous mind that allows experiences in and out of your being. But getting there doesn’t come from removing what is sad or dark or painful.
In truth, I think it comes from allowing and accepting what is, in a moment, to just be what it is.
Those who have fully, insanely and deeply love know that love never truly leave us.
That is the nature of love, it leaves a deep and massive footprint in our heart. Also, it gives eternally.
So, regardless of where the ones we love are or are not, the choice to let their love, their presence and their memory walk with us, in our everyday life, rests with us.
May your spotless mind let more love flow in and out of your Being.