Past Is Never Dead

 

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Past is never dead, future is never born, the present is the reality. People say, make a clean breast of everything, the bygone is bygone, make a new beginning. Yes, we make new beginnings but the past is a lingering stream, however, dry or thin, it moves alongside the present. The now moment is born of the past moment undivorced it gives directions unconsciously. It induces comparisons, suggests adjustments and here comes in the future. Since all moments are fleeting, the events too change colours. Childhood leads to youth and youth to age. At no stage childhood is obliterated from one’s memory. Similarly youth lingers in old age and man attains second childhood- old fools are babes again wrote Shakespeare. But the new old babe too has dreams of youth. The memory has no childhood or age; it grows exapands like drops of rain in puddles, then ponds, then rivers ultimately flowing into the sea as a whole comprising undistinguished childhood, youth and age. Memory is the foundation of dreams which are for the morrow. When someone says my dreams are fulfilled, he unconsciously admits that the bud has blossomed. Imagination presupposes memory and memory holds past and future on the tablets of the present. Life is an eternal present, all stages of life, all events, dreams, plans and futurist imagination flow along a man’s changing perceptions of reality which often compels adjustments to accommodate desires.

Ask a lover for whom love is a marriage of true minds, he will narrate his love as a perpetual quest for excitement. The excitement is not a physical passion or a desire for sexual union, it is the excitement of life which is temporary, evanescent and unsubstantial: the lover makes his life of love eternal, concrete and substantial for he/ she creates a world of his/her own unique, full and vast. He has no dead past. He remembers his tiffs, quarrels, swollen faces as well as the salacious moments of sweaty togetherness. He remembers his dreams of a new beginning every moment, his imaginative constructs of his own heaven. Also remembers the quagmire of hell he had to wade through in tearful eyes: And all this in his present moment. The past is never an isolated package which can be locked up in an iron box and thrown into the sea. The sea too is memory of this planet’s life. Yesterday is not a dead page of history. Unborn tomorrow is not a new species of time. Today comprises yesterday and tomorrow. Life has all yesterday’s in sequential order, however, disorderly the sequence be, and life is a ‘present’ with changing dates, new sunrises and sunsets in different seasonal moods of the mind.

Whenever the dread of the existence shatters our present we look back in love to the mother’s arm, father leaving us at the school gate and children flirting with things, humans, birds and beasts with restoring nostalgia. So, the past is with us in moments of joy, sorrow and boredom. A desert reminds us of our backyard garden and imagination makes us dream of the Nandan Kanan with its Parijats: the desert does not get transformed immediately into a childhood garden nor to the divine flowers of never to be seen heaven. The present runs continuous as we change in form and attitude under the pressure of our reality.

Diversity is the nature of life and in this diversity we feel constancy. A being constantly searches for himself, that is renews himself but all renewals happen in time which has no independent divisions or distinct categories. Language, culture, training, the office, marriage or love- all give us disciplines which are imperatives but nothing is a categorical imperative. Life always remains unformulated, open leading to discovery of the self. The knowledge which the discoveries give an individual is never complete.  Similarly a man’s constancy too is never complete. His past his future always make his present a throbbing moment of quest. Past and future however die when the present is static, repetitive and without quest. Of course such a present means the end-call it death or cessation of the being.

Gautam the prince and Buddha the enlightened one are not totally different. Overindulgence in beauty, youth, luxury and sexual pleasure suddenly lost their charm as Buddha encountered the other realities. The past stood as a contrast to the present and the renouncement that followed was not a u turn, rather a connective stimulant to new thoughts, new discovery of the total reality. Time only leads a man to self- knowledge. It may be a foolish or futile anagnorisis but it happens. Time with its past memory and evolutionary history makes a man what he is. The hero of life is recognized in the last scene but the previous scenes only lead us to the recognition.