A PERFORMANCE

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YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY

A PERFORMANCE

The old actor felt funny stood on a stage after so long. At first, he felt nervous, but soon his confidence returned and his voice boomed around the theatre.
It was as good as ever, his lines perfect, his acting masterful. He wished it would never end. He was born for this, and knew he was nothing without a performance to give, an audience to applaud.

Would the critics love me still? He thought.

The spectator stood in the aisle, looking up to the stage, his face a picture of amazement. He, too, had not been in this theatre for such a long time. And as he stood there he could only remember the good times, the inspiration that this actor gave him in his youth, implanting, in his mind, the idea that he, too, would be a great actor. And indeed, he was.
But soon he realized it was time to go, time to move on, the memories of this old, now closed and ramshackle theatre fading.
The old actor sensed this end to the performance, and at first did not realize he was just a memory, having died many decades ago.
With this realization he was sad, but as he disappeared and returned to the memory of the spectator, he realized that he was no longer merely dead, but in his remembrance, immortal.

© Anthony North, April 2008

FOREVER COLOSSEUM

I stand before the lion, the crowd does cheer,
he charges straight towards me, I use my spear;
What spectacular theatre, as the blood does flow,
but I missed, it’s mine, and the trumpets blow;
My life was worth nothing, I was just a slave,
isn’t it funny how people behave?
The Colloseum is gone, consigned to the past,
but the persecution of many, it does last,
so remember the Colloseum when you think you know best,
‘cos history proves
you’re no better than the rest

(c) Anthony North, April 2008

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THE MEMORY THING

One of the central elements of our humanity is our ability to remember. Through memory we access an unlimited theatre of thoughts and experience from our unconscious. But why do we have a memory, and how does it work?
It’s a funny thing, is memory. In many ways I think it is peculiarly human, in that we have a conscious and unconscious mind. Most animals are thought to work through instinct, as if controlled at a species level.
The thing that separates us from the animals is our technology, and to become the technologist, we needed the ability to remove thoughts from our conscious in order to concentrate on a task in hand, thus needing a memory store we call the unconscious.
We couldn’t ‘be’ without this, for it seems that when we sense the world, everything that can be sensed enters the unconscious. In other words, we see, hear, smell and feel everything. It is this factor that, I’m sure, lies behind much of what we call the paranormal.
But if we ‘remembered’ all of this all of the time, we would suffer information overload, making it impossible for us to concentrate. Hence, we have a ‘filter’ which selects only the information we want at that particular time.
Perhaps this is why different people have very selective views of what they experience, even their beliefs being based upon this selectiveness. Maybe if this ‘mechanism’ was better understood, we would learn to understand, and tolerate, others more.

© Anthony North, April 2008