Re: Memory

[To be edited at a later date. I didn't want to wait until posting.]

This is a response to Susie's two posts on memory. I want to share my thoughts on the subject as well as reply to some of the things she said. I'm making a post instead of a comment because I feel like this might get lengthy.

I wish I had my Nabokov quotes ready, but my library is in Newton.

I suppose the main question that Susie raises is "Why do people suffer from unwanted memories?" I'm sure that one could spend a large portion of one's life tracking down the various answers to this, given by a parade of authorities in various fields. The psychoanalysts would be the most vocal group, insisting that the involuntary return to unpleasant memories is indeed a symptom of your mind's desire to confront or correct something about itself, to find, if not wisdom, peace. The religious would probably agree that some kind of confrontation leading to peace is the purpose, though they might claim God's intervention, rather than the inner dynamics of the mind, as the motivating factor. An artist might maintain that painful memories are meant to be turned into art, a humanist that they keep us in touch with our humanity, but an elephant, I am almost sure, would assert that memory simply is. And, at the risk of being boring, so would I.

I take a scientific perspective of things. It's a good way to keep oneself honest, even if the conclusions are unpleasant. I don't believe that a reason (in the teleological sense) exists for anything in nature--memory included--except perhaps to be for its own sake. And I don't think that counts. I'm not against people creating reasons, finding meaning in what is given, but I think it's dangerous not to recognize the provisional quality these. I feel compensated for this existential state of affairs, or divine silence, by the endless mystery and beauty in the world. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that I don't believe in any reason for nature; I don't deny the possibility of one, but I don't think that we, as we currently exist, are capable of grasping it.

Which is all a lot of preface to my saying that I think memory is just a product of natural selection, bequeathed to our ancestors to help them deal with life in the jungle, possessed to a lesser degree by other living creatures, and ultimately ill-suited, in a manner of speaking, to war and other modern miracles. That is to say, I don't believe that the mind "is not completely controlled by chemicals and electrical impulses." It is, and this is why we have problems.

Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off--on her carelessness in taking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds had grown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before here eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (1)

Susie says that "Some are able to repress their memories, but in the end often have psychological problems because of them." This leads to her next paragraph in which she asks why the mind doesn't deal with harmful memories in the same way that the body deals with states of imbalance or harm. It's a good question. I know a little bit about repression (my mom is a psychologist), but I haven't studied it in depth. From what I've heard, repression most typically occurs when someone suffers trauma or abuse at a very young age. This is also when alternate personalities may be created to deal with such situations. Of course, one hears about older people repressing experiences as well. I wonder how often that actually occurs... it's a popular device in movies, but it doesn't seem like it actually occurs that often. And what's the difference between repressing something and simply forgetting something unpleasant? I could be wrong about this, but I do think that Susie is right in implying that repression is a relatively rare occurrence. One reason for this might be that it defeats memory's purpose (in a biological, not teleological, sense). If memory evolved to help us survive, it's greatest utility would be in recalling times when our immediate survival was threatened. These are also likely to be our worst memories. This isn't to say that other kinds of memories aren't more painful--but our brain may be incapable of distinguishing one kind of negativity from the other. To it, pain may equal threat, which may equal something important to remember.

Although considering that the mind is the most complex object in the known universe, that's probably an oversimplification at best.

Susie asks if memory can be controlled. It doesn't seem that it can. When things remind us of other things, our immediate experience is linked to a memory in a totally involuntary fashion. Memories float up out of the depths and settle in our consciousness for no apparent reason. We can, of course, also harness memory to our own purposes--we can try to remember something--but there is no guarantee that it will succeed. Memory is like a mostly obedient pet that does what we tell it to, but nonetheless has a will of its own. It is capable of disobeying. Where does this will come from? I can only say that it arises from the complex interplay of neurons whose functioning remains hidden from us. In this, they are like dreams. To pretend I know any more would be dishonest.

Although we began by discussing memory's problematic aspects, I could not do with leaving it there. For me, memory is too wrapped up with beauty not to pluck at some of the ties between them. And this is where I miss Nabokov. He wrote and spoke profoundly on the subject of memory, as did Proust. And we owe Kundera for naming (but not discovering) the concept of poetic memory:

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. (2)

Anyone who has ever had a beautiful experience will immediately recognize what Kundera is speaking about. There are memories that seem qualitatively different from the mass of our recollections. I once read something about the poet's task being to capture the multitude of simultaneous sensations in a single moment and transmute them into a single object of beauty. I don't know how true this is as a statement about poetry in general, but it seems to me to apply equally well as a description of the kind of microcosm that our poetic memory allows us to enter . Nabokov (always Nabokov) spoke of the way that memory changes over time--not deceiving, but like a jewel becoming ever more polished. I am convinced that Nabokov had capacity for poetic memory that far exceeded the average, and that this, more than anything else, is what made him the author he is. Whether this was a quirk of his memory itself, or a certain orientation of the rest of his mind toward it, I can't guess.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.(3)

I know that memory can be troubling. Even in a perfect present, it renders the past inescapable. But it is also what gives our experience texture (how thin the world would be if we couldn't latch on to some object in front of us and drift on a chain of associations away from the here and now). I think that the key to happiness lies in developing the ability to perceive the beauty of the moment and to retain that beauty, not just as a souvenir, but as something grows inside of us. Memory is alive. I said earlier that I regard its malfunctioning as an accident of our neurology. For all I know, its poetic qualities are also accidental. But in both the beauty and the suffering that it invokes, memory adds a depth to our existence that allows us to hope that we may one day, in some way, rise above the contingencies of mind and matter. God may be silent, but the past speaks in shouts and whispers--who can say where it will lead if we listen?

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(1) Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. pp. 6-7
(2) Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. ???
(3) Nabokov, Vladimir. Who knows from where, I had to look it up. This is the end of my memory.