Mnemonic

In Simon McBurney's landmark play performed by Theatre de Complicite, Mnemonic captures the very essence of human existence - the recovery of one's individual history.

For history is identity. To know who we are, in the here and now, we need to remember our past for it is the past that shapes the conscious and unconscious present.

Yet memory is always fragmented and tainted with nostalgia. We can never recover the past completely and must contend with a fractured yesterday, snippets and 'snapshots' of moments within the event, freeze-frames of something or someone that has left strangely a mark on memory and carved a space of eternity in one's existence. There is never History, only moments of histories, seconds remembered.

And that is the failing of the human physiology. The past cannot be voluntarily constructed; it is dependent on mnemonics - devices of association that recall and represent the now forgotten moment. Mnemonics are everywhere and everything and their symbolic meaning unique only to an individual. It is as personal as time itself. And neurological studies have proven that smell and sound, in that order of precedence, are the strongest mnemonic senses. To smell and hear something familiar is to open the doors to the memories trapped within the sub-conscious. And they advent a wave of memories that surprise, memories that we thought were lost (and could not have realised they were lost).

On a quiet sunny afternoon, like any other quiet sunny afternoon, the ordinariness was broken by the sound of a bell, the sound so familiar of my childhood, the sound of a bell that is rung when an aged man pushes his ice cream cart round. And in that moment, the past came rushing back with its torrent of emotions triggered by this simple and most coincidental mnemonic.

And in that moment I wanted to recover that past once again, the past of a simpler time when these sounds brought such simple joys of an ice cream treat, of friends and classmates gathering round the cart digging their pockets for the 50c they had saved just for this treat.

As the cart moved on past the quiet streets of the estate on a lazy afternoon, I mustered up the courage to chase down my past. I dragged the niece and nephew out onto the street and we followed the sounds of the bell. Turning two corners we found him moving away from us and somehow in that moment of coincidence or destiny (or perhaps he heard the screaming children), the Ice Cream man stopped and turned around.

The niece bought a Chocolate Chip ice cream in a cup and as I looked at the menu on his cart, little has changed apart from the price being doubled from that when I was a child. The Magnolia umbrella, the white-push cart, the biscuits and bread and the (limited) range of flavours - they all seemed so familiar. The dollar was parted most willingly and by all means and standards a dollar still reasonable - a reasonable price to pay for an attempt at recovering an invaluable memory.

Yet those weren't the things that made the moment significant on a dull afternoon - it was his smile and the joy the Ice Cream man exuded when he made his sale. He seemed at such peace and was filled with joy at peddling a sweet treat (I could of course be overly-romanticising). That smile, it brought me back 25 years to the school compound filled with screaming children, stained uniforms and a tall aged Angsana tree. In that minute at the cart, I was a child once again. And I was happy.

As we walked away and the children bickered over who gets first bite, I turned around to smile one last time at an encounter I may never have again in this lifetime. As we walked away, the realisation that time moves relentlessly forward gripped me in ways that refuse to let go. It was a realisation that as we grow older we seek pleasures that take us nowhere but down the path of misery and self-destruction. We forget what it's like to be child-like, to be kind, to enjoy the simple pleasure of a sweet treat on a warm and sunny afternoon.

We forget. But at times (like these) we remember - what it is to be simple.