On the Way, on the Camino

Memories, Emotions and Reflections: Part V: Reflections

Reflections

An event in physics is instantaneous. Often the ‘Big Bang’, which (supposedly) instantaneously jump-started our universe 13.8 billion years ago, is called an ‘event’. However in daily life we use ‘event’ for something that happens over time, like a test, or a sporting event or even a war.

For almost every non-accidental personal event, like walking the Camino for 30 days, the mind’s representation of the event changes, before, during and after the event. You’re a student and an important math test looms two weeks in the future. You prepare as test day approaches. You have ‘ideas’ about the test, what the questions will be, how well you know the subject. You are stressed perhaps as you think about the test. Test day comes, you take the three hour test, the test is over. Then you have ideas about how well you did. Then after a week you know your result. Then after two weeks you get the test paper back. Then two years later you think back to the test as a key milestone in your academic career.

When is the most intense moment connected to your thoughts about the test? During the preparation? During the test itself? At the reception of the grade?

And when is the actual moment of the test? At the beginning? After two hours? At the end?

This may seem like a pointless series of questions. But let’s add a little twist. When you get your test results you’re shocked to discover that you received a zero, a big fat goose egg, on this very important test. How is that possible? You make a call or send an email. The response: “I’m sorry Student XYZ, you received a zero because you did not in fact take the test!” “What? Yes I did!” “No, you didn’t because there is no record of you coming in to take the test and furthermore we don’t have any test with your name and number. Sorry; officially you never took the test and therefore you received a zero and no, you cannot retake the test. So you failed the course and therefore you will not receive your diploma. Ever.”

My question. What representation, in your consciousness, do you now have of the test? Did you in fact take the test if the officials in charge of the test say you did NOT take the test? Your memory says you prepared for the test and you took the test, but, if officially, you did NOT take the test, did you in fact take the test? Yes, you did something: you solved some math problems for three hours, but that is all you did. Imagine telling a future potential employer, explaining why you don’t have a diploma, ‘In fact I took the test but they said I didn’t take the test, that’s why I don’t have a diploma.’ ‘Hmm’ says the human resources recruiter, ‘I’ve heard that one before! Sorry, I hear they’re hiring at McDonalds, good luck!’.

Let’s return to another ‘event over time’, the Camino, ‘MY CAMINO’. Let’s say an official from the association that ‘governs’ the Camino reads my Camino essays and sees that I did not, in fact, visit the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela when I arrived there on June 21, 2025. And, unbeknowst to me, there is a rule, in fine print on the back of my ‘crédential’,

my Pilgrim’s Passport, that says ‘To officially receive the diploma that says that one has ‘done’ the Camino the pilgrim must visit, inside, the Cathedral’. The official cancels my diploma and erases the record that I have ‘done’ the Camino.

The ‘event’, Lawrence McGuire’s ‘CAMINO’, no longer officially exists. Did I do the Camino? Yes, I walked around 800 kilometers for 30 days, but did I ‘do the Camino’? And what is now my representation of the Camino? Surely that new representation would make me feel differently. Perhaps resentful, perhaps disappointed, perhaps self-incriminatory. And my new representation of the past event would only be a change in my memory, a change in the way I remembered the Camino. ‘Silly man! You did the whole Camino Francés then you didn’t visit the Cathedral!’.

Now, imagine my descendant, my great great granddaughter, in 2125, doing some genealogical research. There is a family legend that her great great grandfather Lawrence ‘did the Camino’ way back in 2025. She is able to find the official records of 2025 in Santiago and there is NO RECORD that says anybody named Lawrence McGuire ‘did the Camino’ in 2025.

“Oh well, just a story he made up. Grandma says he was known for making up a lot of stories!”

This is not a fruitless hypothetical exercise. First, do you accept that we can define an ‘event’ as something that lasts not just three hours, like a test, but thirty days, like ‘doing the Camino’? Wasn’t WWII an ‘event’? Don’t we talk about it as an event? How long did it last? Let’s talk about another event that lasts around a month, like the Camino, and is also connected to France. The Tour de France.

The Tour de France is of course the most famous bicycle race in the world. But it’s not in fact one race, it’s a series of races over the course of around 25 days. Like the thirty, more or less, walking days of Camino, each race is called a ‘stage’. Winning just one stage of the Tour de France is a stunning professional achievement. Winning the Tour itself defines a cyclist as one of the best of his time. Winning the Tour five times, like the Spaniard Miguel Indurain, puts the cyclist on the Mount Olympus of sport, up there with Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth, and other great sports icons. Imagine if a cyclist won the Tour de France SEVEN times in a row! Who would he be? The GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of cycling, for sure!

Well someone did. Then he didn’t. Everybody saw it on TV. Everybody read about it in the newspapers or online. It was official. He won the event known as the Tour de France seven straight times. He was the most famous American sports star in French culture for twelve years. And then, in 2012, thirteen years after his first tour victory, poof, he, as a winner, no longer existed, in the official world of the Tour de France and in French media. He was ‘disappeared’. Despite what I remembered, while living in France, he in fact did NOT win the Tour de France even once. Not even once. His ‘wins’ did not in fact happen. Yes, he had ridden his bicycle all around France for a decade or more, but the cyclist they called ‘Superman’ didn’t win anything at all.

The Lance Armstrong story is surely one of the greatest examples of being ‘officially disappeared’ of all time. Armstrong, as many of you know, was stripped of all his wins long after those wins officially occurred for cheating with banned substances, for doping.

I was thinking about that while watching this years Tour de France on French television. It was Stage 14, in the Pyrenees, which Tadej Pogocar won convincingly, and thus effectively won the Tour de France because it put him so far ahead, with a grueling sixteen kilometer climb up Hautacam Mountain.

As the announcers cover the Tour they refer often to racing lore, to other stages in other years that also finished with a famous climb. They mention famous winning climbs by Eddy Merckx and Indurain and Greg Lemond and Richard Virenque, up various mountains, but Armstrong’s famous victory on Hautacam is completely ignored. All his incredible Tour de France cycling exploits are completely ignored.

As if they had never happened. In fact, they never happened. Hautacam? Armstrong never climbed that mountain faster than the other racers and won. Yes he was on his bicycle pedaling, and he finished before everybody else, but he didn’t win. Even though the officials said he won. And everybody said he had won for fifteen years. And then, poof, he had not won.

And you know what is strange? Nobody won! Despite declaring Armstrong the non-winner, the Tour officials did not make the second place finisher the winner. The reason: the top cyclists were ALL doping! According to the Tour Officials. But even though the Tour said ‘all the top cyclists were doping’ only Armstrong was stripped of his stage wins. Other riders who won stages that year got to officially keep their stage wins. Including Richard Virenque.

My concern here is not Armstrong per se, or Virenque. but with the question ‘what is reality?’. However, a short but illuminating digression: the French cyclist Virenque had also been found legally guilty of doping, after he had won many Tour de France stages in the 1990’s. And later he won more stages though most observers suspect he was still doping. However Virenque was not stripped of his titles. Now he is a popular TV sportscaster in France; he’s there at the end of the stages of the Tour de France, and the French media proudly show videos of him winning a famous stage. So Virenque ‘still exists’, officially. But Armstrong has been ‘disappeared’. The discrepancy between punishments is worthy of a long article or even a book. Official ‘memory’ is very important!

So, let’s relate that to my question, ‘what is an event’? For Armstrong, the tour of 2000 was preceded by other races and of course a lot of training, preparing for the Tour. Then the tour event occurred, in the midst of which was his Hautacam stage win. For twelve years he, and everybody around him, remembered this as a win. Then, thirteen years later he hadn’t won. Remember the ‘test’ I mentioned at the beginning of this little essay? Just like the student in the test, the ‘past reality’ of the Hautacam stage changed over time, from a win to a non-win.

Now, returning to my memory of ‘my Camino’. I’m on the terrace of my home, an 800 year old ‘maison de village’ above a river whose flow over the old curving dam I can hear from where I sit typing these words. If I walked around the corner and up the cobble-stone lane, I would face a 1000 year old Romanesque church, in sight of the Cévennes Mountains. Looking up I watch the morning sunshine climb the river-stone walls of an old tower.

I ‘think about’ or ‘remember’ or ‘reflect upon’ my EVENT, ‘My Camino’. Where is it besides in my memory? I have ‘evidence’ that my event occurred in the words I wrote and the photos I took. But that’s not official. My official evidence is my diploma, the certificate I received at the Pilgrim’s Passport Office on the morning of June 21^st, 2025, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Look closely at my certificate. Look at the dates. It says I started on June 23, 2025 and finished on June 21, 2025!

That’s impossible! Either I’m officially a time traveler or….my diploma is obviously inaccurate and would never be accepted legally as official proof that in fact I did my ‘event’.

In my memory I ‘did my event’. And I anticipated the event in my mind for years beforehand, and the event lasted 29 days, and then I remembered the event. It exists in my memory now. And in the memory of maybe fifty other people, more or less, I ‘did my event’. The event, to state the obvious, is ‘in the past’. It’s gone. What exists now is me sitting on my terrace typing these words, looking up at a cloudy sky, looking carefully at the brown tips of my two ailing (from the summer heat wave) wisteria plants.

Now, contemplate the fact that on July 21, 2000 thousands of people cheered as Lance Armstrong crossed the finish line at the top of Hautacam mountain and won the 15^th stage of the Tour de France thus almost guaranteeing his eventual second time win of the ‘event’, the 2000 Tour de France. Millions of people around the world believed he won that Hautacam stage and that he later won five more Tours for a total of seven. Millions of people for thirteen years believed Armstrong won the Hautacam stage. They saw him with their own eyes, they saw him win live on TV, they read about him. He was everywhere celebrated as a Tour winner. Then, officially, he in fact had not won a single event, a single race, and in fact he officially didn’t even exist, except as an occasional mention, at most, as a cheating doper. They even pixelate-out his face when showing racing clips. Meanwhile Richard Virenque, officially, exists, to the point that he is still a hero in France and speaks to millions as a TV commentator. His ‘winning events’ still exist.

Do we all see the incredible power of ‘official approval’? ‘Official Truth’? ‘Authorized Truth’? The ‘Truth according to Authority’?

There’s a famous example of this procedure of ‘official deletion’ from the Soviet Union. In a photo official hero Vladimir Lenin is on the podium orating to a crowd and Leon Trotsky is prominently there at the steps of the podium.

When Stalin took power Trotsky became an official villain and an exile and though the photo continued to be published in the Soviet Union Trotsky was ‘airbrushed out’ as we say now, from the photo and from the official history of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the success of which Trotsky had in fact played a key role, second only to Lenin himself.

This was certainly an example of the process which George Orwell wrote about in his political novel 1984, when ‘events’ and ‘truths’ and reality itself could be transformed with the magic of ‘official’ decisions from one year to the next and from one day to the next. One day your country was at war with Oceania, the next day Oceania was your ally and, importantly, had ALWAYS been your ally. Or vice versa. Stalin the ‘evil dictator’ of the 1930’s, who made an infamous non-aggression pact with Hitler, was, in the US, during WWII, magically transformed into the US’s ally, good old ‘Uncle Joe’. Just a couple of years later he was an evil dictator again.

Official approval of a past event has an incredible power over our lives. It has in fact the power of life and death, of economic success and economic failure. Yet, what is it, in fact, this past event? It’s a representation of the past, not THAT different from my representation of the past of my Camino as I sit here typing these words on my computer. It’s not THAT different because it exists only in memory. A history book is after all memory, and it becomes when read the individual’s memory.

There is a famous document called the Donation of Constantine which for hundreds of years was officially a legitimate document ‘proving’ an ‘event’: that the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire had designated the Bishop of Rome as having religious primacy over all of Christendom, and political supremacy in the Western Roman Empire. That document was widely suspected of being a forgery long before it ceased being used to justify the Pope’s political and religious power. Now it’s officially defined as a forgery.

How is that document, once considered ‘official’, any different from my Camino Diploma? It purported to ‘prove’ an historical event and wanted to make that event part of the common memory. Have I not done the same, in a much smaller way, with the story of my Camino? But my event was real! But at one time everybody thought the event called the Donation of Constantine was real too…

I’m not trying to make a philosophical or political argument in favor of constant skepticism, though that could obviously be done. I’m asking whether I can sit on my terrace and observe my own memory of my own event, ‘My Camino’, and by understanding the implications of that observation I can learn something about ALL other events. And I’m suggesting that you try the same experiment, regarding your own memory.

Lance Armstrong won the stage on Hautacam Mountain in 2000. Then, he didn’t. Although now there are millions of people who remember watching Armstrong win that stage, that number is dwindling by the year. Nobody alive was an eye-witness to the winner of the first Tour de France in 1903. Yet that race is still an important part of cycling history. As Armstrong continues to be ‘disappeared’ from cycling history we can predict quite confidently that by the bi-centenary of the Tour de France in 2103 he will have been almost completely forgotten, mentioned only in a footnote on the back pages of an ‘official history of the tour’ published in the year 2100. Meanwhile Richard Virenque will no doubt continue to be celebrated as the French multiple winner of the coveted polka dot jersey,

signifying him as the dominant ‘climber’ of his time. Official approval is obviously very, very important.

Let’s return to something I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion of memory, war. I was an anti-war activist before, during and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Naturally I have an interest in the history of the anti-war movement in the US. It was quite a surprise to me when I learned long after my university years that there had been a robust anti-war movement prior to the US entry into World War One and World War Two. Those movements have not been ‘disappeared’ from ‘official history’ like Lance Armstrong, because officially there ARE no official histories. However the history of anti-war movements which preceded the two World Wars in the US is not taught to US high school and university students. One has to dig.

If you say: ‘One reason President Wilson won reelection in 1916 is because he promised to keep the US out of the war in Europe, however one month after his 1917 inauguration he entered the war...’, this statement would be considered historically accurate, but it’s not emphasized at all when we study the war. If you say ‘President Roosevelt was able to take the US to war in December 1941 because the huge nationwide anti-war movement was neutralized by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor...’ this would be also considered historically accurate.

But what if you said ‘President Wilson knew he would take the US to war but he lied on the campaign trail because of the strength of the anti-war movement and after he was elected he intentionally inflamed pro war sentiment in the US via official propaganda by forming Committee on Public Information’. And what if you said ‘President Roosevelt provoked Japan into attacking the US in December 1941, and he knew the Japanese bombers were on the way, but he intentionally didn’t relay this information to the US Navy in Pearl Harbor because he needed a justification for taking the US to war because of the strength of the anti-war movement’?

Clearly those statements would be controversial, and would be considered in conflict with official history, even though officially there is no official history.

I won’t belabor the point. But think of all the ‘historical events’ that could potentially change YOUR life, or the life of your country, if ‘officially’ these events were ‘proven’, convincingly proven in your own mind, and in the ‘common mind’, to not have occurred, or to have occurred differently than we currently think they occurred.

How are those events different from ‘My Camino’? And keep in mind the Camino itself is, according to ‘official history’, a Pilgrimage to the final resting place of Santiago, Saint James, an apostle, who died in Palestine and whose body was transferred to the then-roman province of Hispania. Would the Camino exist without that official history? That, as I have written previously, was one of my questions as I did ‘my Camino’.

I sit on my terrace as the sunbeams rise up the stones of the old tower and I reflect on ‘My Camino’. I can also reflect on World War One, and World War Two, and the anti war movements at that time. I can reflect on Lance Armstrong crossing the finish line on Hautacam in 2000. I can reflect on the Big Bang. It’s all in my memory. And when I say ‘my memory’, I mean these ‘facts’ are all mixed together somewhere, I’m not sure where, but in a place where I can retrieve them and write or speak about them.

If somebody comes up the cobblestone lane and says ‘Hey McGuire, you’re lying, you didn’t walk 800 kilometers a month ago because there is no official record!’ maybe I would laugh, maybe I would get angry. How dare somebody question the integrity of what I wrote! Or question the accuracy of my memory! But even if my emotions did get involved I doubt anybody else would care.

If a sports announcer on French TV said ‘Well, in fact Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times fair and square because everybody was doping anyway, and he deserves to keep his titles just like Richard Virenque has officially kept his titles!’ I have no doubt MANY people’s emotions would get juiced, and he would be fired. There are ‘official histories’ worldwide that, depending on the country, if you publicly question that history you will lose your job and maybe even go to prison.

There are ‘statements about the past’ that if you make them you will possibly lose friends and be ostracized by your family. Or you will be physically attacked and even killed. This is obviously true historically. What, after all, does it mean to be burned at the stake for heresy?

Nobody, including me, will start a fight if somebody says ‘Lawrence McGuire did not in fact DO the Camino de Santiago!’. Nobody will go to prison for ‘denying’ ‘my Camino’. Nobody will lose their job for questioning whether in fact I walked across Spain in the Spring of 2025.

But how is my walk across Spain (perhaps I should say my supposed walk across Spain, now I’m starting to doubt whether I did it!) any different, in my mind as I sit on my terrace, from the Big Bang?

What if a freshman in University in Astro-Physics 101 was asked in an exam:

‘At what point after the Big Bang did star formation begin?‘ and he or she answered with one sentence: ‘In fact the Big Bang is a modern creation myth, allegiance to which is required for one to join the priesthood of the Science religion’. I doubt whether the student would receive a passing grade and thus would have a difficult time becoming an ‘official’ scientist. The Big Bang is, for me, a memory; which I learned, just as you the reader have learned about ‘my Camino’, by reading and listening.

Look at the incredible power of the past, even a past that is 13.8 billion years old, on our consciousness and our perceptions. It’s really, potentially, a question of life and death. Where does the death come from, when someone is burned at the stake for heresy? Obviously the organized violence of the state, whoever that happens to be at the time.

What if Lance Armstrong had insisted on continuing to race in the Tour de France after his banishment and he tried to ride down the French highways with the rest of the ‘péloton’? He would have been restrained and probably arrested by the police, the organized power of the state. In the Soviet Union of 1935 anybody insisting on the 1917 deeds of Trotsky would have been sent to the Gulag by the police, by the organized power of the state, or killed, like Trotsky himself was killed, in Mexico in 1940, by Stalin’s secret service.

If I was the dictator of the small village where I live and you came trudging up the cobblestone lane shouting ‘Lawrence McGuire didn’t in fact do the Camino in June 2025! I have a copy of his diploma and it’s mis-dated and thus fraudulent! In addition his own words show that he didn’t even visit inside the Cathedral of Santiago! McGuire is a Camino fraud!’ what would I do? Perhaps, if my power of village dictator was based on my reputation of having ‘done the Camino’, just as Stalin’s reputation was based on having been the number two leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, I would have the threat to my power imprisoned in the castle at the top of the hill or even thrown off the high cliffs above the village thus, hopefully, silencing his alternate representation of my past forever.

And the next morning, sitting on my terrace, watching the sunrays climb the stone tower, I could ‘think about’ the Big Bang, World War One, World War Two, the Tour de France, ‘My Camino’ and the images of all these diverse events would be mixed together in my mind ‘in the past’. And even though the heretic had been punished, maybe I would notice that what the heretic had asserted was in fact just a different memory than mine. And that is a key aspect of Radical Perceptionism. What is reality beyond memory? What is the reality of the past? Where does the past exist? Why is it so important?

I’m NOT saying ‘there is no reality’. I’m NOT saying ‘the past is gone, the past doesn’t matter’. I’m saying ‘what can I learn about the nature of the past just by sitting on my terrace and looking at, perceiving, how my memory works’? As we move, supposedly, into the age of Artificial Intelligence, when there is great conflict over various representations of the past, and of the present, and of reality itself, surely this question is worth asking, by every individual?