Some Thoughts on Memory
“ . . . While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.”—Wordsworth
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”—Proust
“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”—D. Bowie
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the happy time.”—Dante
“Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.”—Under Review
“O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”—Tennyson
“Would you do it all again?”—D. Rather
“No, I’d have to pass on that.”—G. Allman
We act like ghosts are extraordinary, but we live with ghosts all the time. They’re called memory. So little of our lives takes place at the point of consciousness.
What is memory? I’ve reached the age where that’s become a pretty important question. Maybe not what is memory? but, where did it go? Short term memory, at any rate. Standing here on the memory side of the memory to what’s-left ratio.
There are bad and good aspects to that fact. The bad is that you are nearer to death. The good is that you are nearer to death.
Our lives are stories—that is, a sequence of points on a narrative line. All the points, including The End, are part of the whole and equally valid. In the shadow of The End, things matter more. You might say, The End forces the issue. Approaching The End creates a hunger for clarity: that’s what the chapters leading into the climax should do.
Related, another perk of being older is the experience of looking over the vast landscape of your life, in all its eras. Each era is a story in itself. Beginning middle end. To sit and gaze over those eras is, like your existence, miraculous. The gestating scene, meeting the people who changed your life, retasting the good—which on a daily basis has congealed into a handful of composite mental photographs; reliving the bad—proving again the truth of the maxim: the more horrible the experience, the better the story.
Who is this person who lived through all those eras and died at the end of each? The person who learned something important in every one and was reborn into a new self? Of course you don’t know this person—you’re not him. The Buddhists seem to understand things best: there is no self. Yes, you learned so much, and no, you didn’t learn it when you needed it, which cost you a life—but you got this other life, which has proven interesting in its own unexpected way, and it’s led you to this point, and justly enough, you need what you learned even more now. You’ve even made your peace with the world well enough that you can say, maybe it was meant to be. Amor fati.
* * *
Memories create the illusion that we can access the past. In fact, there are no primary memories—only fabricated and processed memories. We have no connection to what “really happened,” only to what our sly brains have made of what really happened. We live in a reality of constructions, and tend to remember selectively. Is there really any difference between I don’t care and I don’t remember? And what need do the bricks being laid on the top row have to be concerned with those on the lower layers? The brain, jettisoning dead weight, has to concern itself with now. We have absorbed the old lessons and abandoned the vehicles. And maybe the checkout process from this earth allows us to see the possibility that “we” are actually something different from all that.
* * *
The past, we agree, can’t be changed. And that would be true if not for the fact that we don’t know what the past was. We know only what our memory tells us it was, and memory is the most pliable force on earth.
Actually, in one way the past can be changed. It changes as the context in which we see it changes. I think of riding around in the family cheap-gas guzzler in my childhood in a blissful bubble of innocence, which the guilt of my older self has stolen. The pollution, the tidily hidden injustice, the ignorance. Well, innocence is always just ignorance, isn’t it? Losing the solace of your memories is painful, which is why some politicians want to deny the connection between then and now, claiming we have a right to keep our childish innocence, and working to illegalize the truth of the past that makes us feel guilty.
Righteous is just a sanitized synonym for selfish.
* * *
Scott Fitzgerald, falling apart mentally, wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Maybe he was thinking of his public approval alongside his private sense of failure. The truth is, our older guilt can’t steal the solace of our innocence—it only forces us to live with the two side by side. Like George Carlin, give up judgment—it drains all your energy—and just watch the show. The heart of our exhausting and profitless “culture wars” is memory. Denying the past might get you a few votes, but it won’t save the republic. Like all lies, it will recoil upon you. Where is it going to get us to stick our fingers in our ears and deny the past was unjust—that there was no slavery, no lynchings—or on the other side of the coin, no Confederate generals? We worship generals and other leaders not just because they embody their movements, but because they are single, identifiable entities that make good statues. We’d do better to honor the boy soldiers marching endless miles without shoes, freezing, going hungry, dying. We might then be reminded that we are far more alike than different—and the differences are just how the demagogues sucker us. Let the statues exist alongside each other. We are a republic of contrasts. In spite of all the ludicrous attempts to deny that truth, to cancel Them, it’s still who we are. If your goal is to get rid of Them, where exactly do you think they’re going to go?
We must also accommodate contrasting memories when we have watched someone we love grow weak and die, along with a vision of them in their prime. Or remember the energy and laughter and life of an important place in our life no longer hosting, but echoing, those things. Or remembering our self when we are no longer that self. I think of some of the experiences of my past and can’t see how I have any connection with that person. But of course, I do. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” Theodosius Dobzhensky said. I would add, nothing anywhere in our ever-unfolding universe makes sense without evolution. It’s certainly true for the person I now am. “I” don’t make any sense without the evolution of my selves through time. The mistakes and successes of every self have led to the next. I can’t be any of those selves—I can only remember being them. There is no evolution without memory, and if our brains don’t remember perfectly, our hearts do. Our lived experience evolves into story, and all story comes from and belongs to memory.
The definition of a story is something that has already happened.
* * *
When the narrative you have told yourself to get you through life is exposed as a lie, nothing is more true than the truth that is revealed at that point. In a tragedy, that’s when you die. The truth sets you free.
Loss may be the theme of life, but what you gain from loss—Wordsworth’s “abundant recompense”—is the biggest surprise. “The Lay of the Last Survivor” in Beowulf, the elegiac hymn of the last man standing, is one of the most beautiful passages of poetry ever recorded. Why is the contemplation of the days that are no more so poignant?
Truth is sublime.
January 16, 2024