There was this man, bound in chains, handcuffed with black steel, and deprived all the sensory. His eye is probing out and gyrating but doesn’t see sight. His ear looks intact, hairs all straighten, lips cleaved slight, but none of them linked. All of the dysfunctional organs piled up on his face, floating in the sea of disorganization. He just sat there. Tranquility put him in submerge. And a short path shows itself behind his head.
And that is the front gate of my mind palace. The man is my imagination of the prisoner described in the Allegory of the Cave. He even greets me whenever I am present on the path. First time I learned this idea of mind palace could be traced back to 2016 when I first watched the Sherlock Holmes series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In the episode where Holmes fought against Professor Moriarty, Holmes came to learn that all the crash-point information was not stored in a U-drive but instead professor’s “mind palace”, an avant-garde thought experiment to store detailed account of memories. To be honest, I was triggered when hearing about it. Since I was a little child, I have a bitter-sweet taste for order and patterns, and organizing my mind which even computer proved short-tempered absolutely thrilled me.
So I tried. The whole concept of a mind palace is to create a vivid gateway to store all the memory index, upon which you can quickly recall detailed coincidence. The very first memory tunnel I imagined was my bedroom, floating at the center of an ocean; a sand bridge emerges from the water and lead the path to my bedroom door, quite alike the oak door in Doraemon. The room behind the door looks identical to my bedroom in real life. Only all the colors are enhanced and framed with a bit of silver glow. Every doll, every Lego model, and every empty electronics boxes track down a piece of my memory. Memories on each objects are further categorized into different colors: warm colors represent happiness and cold colors represent struggles. A huge bookshelf sits right next to my bed. That’s where all the academic knowledge goes. Even nowadays when I try to recall a math equation or a thermodynamic formula, I would first lay myself down comfortably onto the bed and grab the books that I needed.
I kept updating my mind palace structure since the first day I create it. The frequency sometimes can go crazily high to as many as several times per month. Each different palace is a great representation of the issues, confusion, success, and insights that I experienced during that period of time. For example, the mind palace was an office when I started my term in the Student Government, and it became one thick stack of blue books at my critical point preparing for the SAT& ACT. Each time before the reformation of my mind palace, I rebuild my common sense base by completely wipe out my previous palace. For a short period of time, recalling things back can be bit more tricking than before, and it came almost natural for me to just dive into my thoughts to rebuild at any moments instantly. I was called wicked and sometimes truthfully worried by my friends and family for my immediate pause of action out of nowhere.
When stepping into college, my life went on the 5G mode. Information comes in like water and are so disorganized in my mind palace that it now can be safely compared with a swamp garbage factory. But that’s the irony of the life. To rebuild, deletion comes first. Rigid butter comes from fluid milk. To reach top, one has to start from the bottom. I was convinced for all these years that mind palace is the specific irony of life for me. And I will devote the same passion and energy to its evolution as the moment of its creation. Diving in my mind, I am the witness of myself.
