On Scars (or) Two Random Kind-of-Related Thoughts

1) I watched Red Dragon last night (turned out I had seen quite a bit of it before, although I'm not sure where or when). The score was a bit heavy handed, but otherwise a very good movie! Hannibal Lecter is one of most fascinating villains on film. In his closing voice-over, a letter addressed to the FBI agent who caught him he says, "What a collection of scars you have. Never forget who gave you the best of them, and be grateful, our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real." How interesting! We see our scars as reminders of pain, and focus on the negative. If 'we're lucky, we can learn from our scars (i.e. quit riding motorcycles, stop dating jerks, etc), and focus on the positive. But Lecter suggests that scars are also a neutral and objective proof that, whatever value we assign to an event, at least we're sure that event actually happened if it leaves a scar. One character in the film had extensive tattooing, so it's not so strange that I started thinking about tattooing. What is a tattoo if not a permanent, self-inflicted scar? When an event doesn't leave a visible physical scar, sometimes some of us have to make our own to reassure ourselves that the past actually happened.

2) Today's topic of deep, showertime thought is the nature of regret. It's such a negative emotion, and it really doesn't serve any purpose. Once a thing is done, it's done, and no amount of wishing things had happened differently can actually change anything. And yet regret is a common and central human emotion that causes us no end of pain, frustration, and generally oogy feelings. So why do humans keep feeling it after all these years of evolution? The only reason I can come up with is that regret teaches us about poor decisions we made, or that other people made, and help us to learn from the past. Memories are faulty, but we tend to remember the things we feel badly about very vividly. Most of us have memories of breaking something when we were little, accidentally hurting someone we cared about, and the like, and usually those memories are sort of burned into our psyches. Like a scar. Either that, or our super-egos are a lot more sadistic than we think, and just delight in rubbing our our ego's nose in its failures.