Elephant Memory
My problem is that I have an elephant memory. I never forget anything, especially if it is far away. That's why I'm always witness to what psychologists call (false memory). This man tells me about the applause that lasted for two hours after his sermon in 1974, and I remember very well that no one applauded. He is not lying. He just falsified his realistic memory. This tells me about the amount he gave to the poor in 1977, and I remember very well that he did not give a penny to anyone. For the same reason, I remember the past and find that it was unpleasant and painful many times. This friend of mine, for example, tells me about the beauty of the past all the time. He drinks a cup of tea and sighs and says: It is not like the tea we used to drink in the seventies. It had a taste and smell that you could smell from miles away. He hears a song by an old popular singer, Ahmed Adawiya, and sighs and says: Imagine that we used to make fun of this voice in the past. How wonderful it is! It is impossible to hear a voice like this. Then he talks about his beloved and how gentle and sweet she was in the past. .. The conclusion that you reach from his words is that society was a paradise in which angels fluttered, and in which bulbuls chirped with an (aggressive) voice, and the girls were more beautiful and the emotions were hotter and the tea had an intoxicating smell.. It seems to me that he drank two cups of tea in the past, so he got drunk and walked in He staggered through the streets until the police almost arrested him... What I remember, for example, is that in his youth he suffered from various psychological disorders, was in constant dispute with his family, and was penniless and poor... He received psychological treatment sessions, and attempted to commit suicide by swallowing five aspirin tablets, pretending - that The fool - that he did not know that it was a very small dose... Never mind, of course, that he did not like tea at all... As for his listening taste, he was complaining incessantly about the corruption of public taste and that these two so-called Abdel Halim Hafez and Farid Al-Atrash were constantly polluting the taste of the youth... But he insists that I do not understand anything.. The past was wonderful to an indescribable extent.. We were filled with happiness.. It seems to me that this disease extends to my friend and to the whole of society, and this is a real problem because we let the truly beautiful things of our present slip away, and we cry endlessly over... A past that will not return. Then we realize that our present has become the past, so we return to screaming and crying. The hobby of crying over ruins is not limited to our ancestors only. We all cry over ruins, but we do not enjoy for a single moment the homes we live in. They must be destroyed first. Let us realize that it is wonderful.. I was talking while playing a song by Shaaban Abdel Rahim in the car cassette player.. and I said to my friend: “This is not the best example for what I am saying, but do not deny that his voice is beautiful.. If someone had found someone to use this voice correctly, it would have become a phenomenon.” In popular singing.. He was not convinced.. We sat in a cafeteria and Farah sniffed the air, and he said in distress: “Even the air is no longer like the air of the past... The air was better twenty years ago.”.. “Maybe because your nose was Twenty years younger. The evening ended and we returned to our homes. At midnight, he called me asking me the name of the Shaaban Abdel Rahim song that I was playing in the car. Then he said: “This night was really beautiful. It reminds me of the nights of my youth. Good morning.” "Fine." When I hung up the phone, I thought for a moment about the meaning of this riddle... Then I realized that Shaaban Abdel Rahim's song had become a thing of the past! He had heard it two hours ago!... And that session had also become one of the sessions of the past! The past was beautiful, but I insist that it is much worse than the present. What about the war? What about the bread lines and the association’s chickens? What about the difficulty of communication? What about the meal you have to eat in one day because there is no refrigerator? What about marrying a woman you have never seen in your life, but you have seen her father? What about having one black and white channel on the TV? What about working without a computer? Are you talking about values? What about Sayed Darwish’s songs like “My lips are eating me, I’m in your show”? Do you find it truly classy and timeless? And safety? What about (Saeed Line), which killed sixty men before the police killed him? The past only has one advantage, which is that it has become the past, which is why we feel nostalgic for it, while the present exists everywhere and at every moment, which is why we abstain from it. The first paragraph of this article has become a beautiful past, which is why I feel nostalgic for that time when I used to write good paragraphs like this!
Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq
