“Nostalgia is a seductive liar.”

Full disclosure, I Chat-GPT-ed that quote, looking for one that could top Joel’s epigraph for this play (he quoted Arthur Yap). Thing is, the source and context didn’t match when I Googled for source and context. Who should I believe, Chat-GPT or Google?

Truth is wile snake. It slithers and slips, its iridescent sheen different coloured depending from where you look at it.

Like Schrödinger’s Cat.

Memory (oh boy) is the quantum of our personal truth. You know the days before paper or thumb drives, you were really the primary way to store memory? The Greeks (or was it the Romans?) developed a precise method to aid that: the Method of Loci. It is a mnemonic memory exercise where a list of items are associated with specific but imagined physical locations. Say you want to remember a birthday day, a lover’s perhaps. You begin by imagining the site where you had your first kiss. Perhaps an old mosaic-tiled playground shaped like a benevolent dragon, where under the slide, you see the digits of their birthdate written in the sand.

No matter how hard we try though, memory decays. Some evolutionary reason has made forgetting part of being human. In an effort to not forget, I record bits and bobs of my life in various digital and physical spaces, relying on a cloud search to dig up old truths. Somehow, I seem to forget faster because I do – I don’t trust my memory. Do you trust your memory?

“Nostalgia is a seductive liar.” – George Ball