in video essay "fear of dark" by jacob geller, he mentioned the following works
mark z. danielewski - house of leaves
genisis noir
ralph ellison - invisible man
and he says:
"Each item, no matter how sentimental or bitter, serves one final purpose: they burn. In each of these works, the fire the protagonists spark in the darkness represents a sort of freedom, a fiery cleanse that separates them from the prior burdens of the plot. They each emerge on the other side of the dark more clear-eyed than when they entered it. But personal growth doesn’t remove the horror of their circumstances. The characters encounter the abyss, no, they lose themselves,
within it. And in the face of true dark, they gather the pieces of their own self-definition, everything by which they identify themselves… and they burn them until there’s nothing left. We’re back to Flamini in the cave. “The solitude, the social uprooting, it consumes you. Or, to put it a better way… you consume yourself.”"
this is a contrast to how a_lilian frame the act of burning memories. by my understanding, a_lilian's video is meant to be a consumable motivator. as all other past memories feels dull and fail to maintain the will of living, the video is meant to be "burned" to keep the on going, one more memory, one more reason to go on.
i agree to both jacob geller's and a_lilian's perspective on what memories ultimately mean for a person. a person's past memories create the person creating the person's future memories. memories are both the definition of the person and the facilitator of the person.
but the act of "burning memories" take on two different meanings.
jacob geller says the burning means destruction of past burdens, it is the act of gaining freedom from oneself. in this point of view, burning memories means to forget and to let go, a forced act in the depth of darkness. the memories are burned to give light, at the same time a part of the protagonists are lost too.
a_lilian says the burning is to consume the willpower the memories contain, when the willpower of a piece of memory is extracted empty, the memory is burned out. the destruction of the memories is metaphorical. the memories are not lost after burned, but the worth of burned memories is diminished as the owner of the memories feel dull to them.
from my experience, memories with willpower extracted empty has deadweight, each piece of willpower from the memories origins from a promise to oneself, "bare with me, and after this we can ...". when the willpower is gone, the deadweight is the unfulfilled promise. there is no point carrying deadweights when keeping oneself in the orbit is already hard, so people choose to forget, or at least, ignore.
these two different framing of the burning of one's own memories correspond to the two aspects of the memories. the memories defines identity, the memories facilitates the identity.