I'm still watching Halo on Paramount+ . In fact, I actually look forward to watching this show with Joe, and I even make him pause the video if I have to leave the room for a minute--something I don't do with any of the other shows we watch together.
And my interest in the show grew even more this week with the fourth episode, "Homecoming," because in addition to cool Military Science Fiction stuff I also got a side dish of something I hadn't been expecting: Food For Thought.
A lot of this episode revolved around the subject of memory. Master Chief / John and all of the other Spartans have had their memories wiped pretty clean...presumably to make them more efficient warriors. But MC / J's interactions with the alien artifact...that should really be "non-human artifact," shouldn't it? Yes, let's make it so...have shaken some things loose, and he is beginning to reconnect with his memories. At one point, a character says, "memories remind you what's important." Oh, wait a minute...I keep forgetting that it's the 21st century. It's Soran, and he says, "Memory's what lets you know who you are and reminds you what's important to you." * (Because, ironically, we no longer have to rely on our memories when we can Google pretty much anything.)
Now on the one hand, that's not a particularly insightful or profound comment. But it got me to thinking. Because I have found that my memory is far from perfect. There are many things that I don't remember until someone else reminds me of them. And there are things that I remember quite differently from others. Which means that my brain is not only filtering out some information...at least from my conscious awareness, but it is also altering some of the information that it retains. (I posit that there is another level of my memory which is either untouched by these processes or less touched by them, since there are times when someone will tell me something or I will see an artifact (human) which inspires a memory I'd forgotten or clarify one which I'd unknowingly altered.) Taking that back to Soran's comments, I'm hearing this: what we remember is what is important to us.
And I find that puzzling. Because I have forgotten some things which I seem to care about...but even moreso because I've found myself remembering things that I don't care about. Or at least that I thought I didn't care about. So what the line from Halo suggests to me is that I've forgotten or misremembered those things because of who I am...or who I see myself to be, at least.
This is pretty simple stuff in some ways. For instance, my sister will sometimes tell stories about our childhood in which I am being cruel to her, such as the time that I pushed her into a fence and her ankle got caught in the pointy things at the bottom. In her memory, she was the victim of a cruel-ish brother, and the fact that she has forgiven me for that shows what a good person she is. My memory of the incident is that we were playing in the backyard, doing a kind of bull and bullfighter thing with her on her bicycle as the bull, and me with a trashcan lid as the bullfighter. When she came at me and ran into the trashcan lid, she slipped from her bike and got her foot caught on the bottom of the fence. In my version, it's just the accidental result of a stupid game two kids were playing. There's no malice, no cruelty, and no need to forgive or be forgiven.
And of course that's just childhood bullshit, but I haven't got it in me to go into any Scenes From a Marriage, where much more powerful things reside. Still, the result would be pretty much the same. I only end up being the bad guy in the other person's version of the story.
What this suggests to me is that it would be spiritually revelatory to delve deep inside and try to recover or repair some of my memories. To get a fuller vision of who I am as a human being.
That seems like a lot to get from a line in a Military Science Fiction show based on a video game.
Oh, speaking of the show....
At one point John goes into his childhood home. It's an absolute wreck--all kinds of vegetation has grown through the house, and there's been lots of damage to the place. If you've ever looked at one of those books of abandoned places, you know what I'm talking about. And then he runs a program through his helmet face shield which allows him to partially see the home as it was when John was a child. (I think it draws on his memories as well as predicative analysis...it is far future tech, after all.) And it was a very interesting way of thinking about the past...what an amalgamation it is of reality and memory and maybe wishful thinking as well.
Anyway...good show. Check it out sometime.
* https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=1283&t=52420
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