there’s something about forgetfulness which brings people back to reason. amnesia occurs to every other bubble-haired heroine in siesta-time telenovelas, so we dream at 3pm that our realities can be distorted beyond recognition. we wish memory weren’t as persistent as that dali portrait of melting clocks.
you might notice that amnesia in telenovelas happen at the most strategic of moments: when the heroine is sick with unbearable longing. pining for her lost love, she listlessly crosses to the middle of what seems like a deserted street when out of nowhere a punk driver/car with breaks busted/ten-wheeler container van swerves sharply from the curbside and knocks her down on the pavement, conveniently tossing her head onto the gutter. as she wakes up to fluorescent lights amidst crisp-linen-looking concerned nurses and medical interns pretending to be busy with checking for vital signs, she is stricken with trepidation that she remembers nothing. shit, not even her own name. then, she is reborn.
she discovers a new love, this time more mature and more wealthy than the root cause of her amnesia. she builds a business empire of some sort and/or becomes a budding superstar while the new paramour looks on beaming with fatherly pride. and then she becomes famous all over mexico/philippines/puerto rico/wherever.
there’s a jim carrey-kate winslet film coming up about a medical procedure that could erase recollections a patient might wish to dispose of. in this movie, kate has all images of jim erased from her memory and jim later follows suit when remembrances of their blissful past proved to be too painful to tolerate.
we could only dream it were that easy.
people try to rework the past by restricting our memories. they commit to flames (quite literally) every object that jolts recollections of a history once held in a position of sensitive merit. they were content. but with dust in their eyes and a swelling in their throats, they linger a little longer as they scrutinize a gradually dying fire that took away every last piece of a putrid past. ashes never really amount to anything special.
personally, i’d rather stack them away where molds would fester them.
but the now-famous telenovela princess, bedecked with glittering gems, hair chopped to a mod bob/jennifer aniston layers, runs into the old flame and is heaved into a stupor of aching remembrance. the face is familiar, but she can’t quite recall where it belongs… and the season ends with a wedding.
the amnesiac ends up with the forgotten.
we could only dream broken hearts were restored in such a fashion. pain would have been but a myth. but we wouldn’t really want that. there would have been less poets and more mortals.
