Orphaned Memories
There are many posts circulating today concerning memory and forgetting, topics of significant personal interest to me; most seem to stem from the NYT’s recent obituary of HM, a man who –like many of Oliver Sacks’ most notable patients- illuminated in his dysfunction an aspect of how our minds work. Benjamin Hilts’ father, it emerges, actually wrote what sound like a compelling book on HM and the problems of memory.
The problem of forgetting is the most commonly contemplated aspect of recollective anomaly: why we don’t remember some event, some person, some period of life, some set of feelings we had for someone, some fact. That our identities rely on the aggregation of memories is demonstrable in cases like that of HM, and movies like Memento aptly portray how horrifying the prospect of generalized forgetting is: without that stable ground, who would we be?
(Note that the totalitarian assault on memory in the form of the revision and denial of history has a similarly destructive and demoralizing effect on nations).
But another problem interests me, too: the problem of orphaned memories. These occur with greater and greater frequency as I age, but I don’t know who else has them.
I recall a stone plaza before a dull, dark church; across the narrow streets on either side are old buildings. There are perpendicular commercial signs above the doors, but I don’t see what they say. It looks to be Europe, and I think I am with my friend Chris. But is this a memory of a place we were, or a memory of a dream?
I was at a darkened restaurant with checkered red tablecloths; I think there were other children there, perhaps after a field trip, although there were parents, too. We are eating crawfish. The parking lot is dusty. It is on the outskirts of town. Is this the recollection of a passage in a novel? I seem to think it is my memory, but how can I verify this?
These memories without contexts are usually visual, but since I tend to remember dreams sometimes years later, I am never able to pin down whether they are real; that I might lose the memory entirely frightens me, so I revisit them over and over, hoping to edify them and, perhaps, accidentally spark some connection to a narrative place-marker.
It is worth reflecting on the implications forgetting has for our identities, our selves; but it is also worth wondering what misplaced memories might mean. If I cannot remember an event, do I avoid the effects of the experience? If I cannot place a memory, is it still part of the tapestry of my personality?
Memory, the basis for everything we are and so many of our quarrels and despairs, is remarkably fallible.
