– In which Dorn remembers and forgets.
alking with Kathleen while driving home from a visit with family and friends this weekend, we thought of a perfect Thanksgiving blog post. It was humorous and insightful, based on past and present experiences with said family and friends, and it was both personal and universal. As I drove and we talked, I wished I had a way to write the post right then—I didn’t trust my memory to retain all the interesting facets of the topic we were exploring.
Sure enough, by the time we arrived at home, I had forgotten that I wanted to write this great idea down immediately. And by next morning, we had this conversation:
“Remember that great blog idea we talked about?”
”Yeah, that was great. What was it?”
“I have no idea. You?”
”Uh, no.”
So instead of that post, I’ll write one about memory.
My memory has always given me trouble. There were some things like numbers and certain classes of facts that I have no trouble retaining. For example, I can remember almost every phone number I ever dialed. But for the most important stuff—the things involving people—my memory is really spotty at best. I have trouble remembering names and birthdates I should know, shared experiences, and the intricacies of evolving personal lives and interactions of my friends, family and acquaintances.
This manifests itself in all sorts of little inconveniences. I have to write down lists of things I want to do, or include in a letter, or shop for, and I have yet to figure out how to remember to read the list when I need it. The best I can do is to have lots of lists lying around (Kathleen hates that), in the hopes that I will be continually reminded of their existence.
And there are a few perks–I think it’s easier for me to forget a past injustice, argument or insufferable encounter. And I suspect (though I have no way of knowing first-hand) that I sometimes find myself surprised and delighted by a new discovery multiple times, provided I wait long enough between revelations for the previous memory to fade.
In balance, it’s a shame, though. My people memories are the things that I love best, but I even have trouble keeping track of things as simple as which grandchild has which birthday. (This is mostly my daughters’ fault, because my grandsons’ birthdays are within a week of each other (different years of course), and so are my granddaughters’.)
I’m pretty sure this is a real deficit, and not just me not settling for a normal, functional but imperfect memory. My friends and fam seem to be able to pull up memories of the past without even trying, while I feel like I really have to work at it. It’s not debilitating, but it does make me feel a twinge of loss, similar to how I feel when my mild deafness prevents me from fully engaging in a conversation.
As an adaptation over the years, I developed a healthy appetite for being engaged in the present moment. I suspect I am no more successful at “being here now” than other people, but at least I try to be conscious most of the time of this goal to be present. This goal coincides with New Age and popular Buddhist philosophies, but I am just trying to get the most from each experience in the present because I don’t know how well I’ll be able to access it again once it’s in the past.
Now that I’ve entered my Third Age, I have to wonder if I should have worked harder at developing my ability to make and keep the kind of memories I wanted. Has my so-called “adaptation” just been a cop-out? Will a time come when I really need to draw on those memories, but I won’t have access to enough of them?
The retirement classes I took always stressed the importance of depositing money into your IRA account regularly starting at the very beginning of your professional life, to assure that by the end of it there will be enough to support you. Is there a similar rule for one’s bank of memories, that I blew off? By adapting rather than trying to improve my memory skills, have I fallen behind in making my deposits to my mental IRA? Will I be able to withdraw enough memories as needed to meet my psychic needs?
There’s no answer to this of course, and I that’s probably not even a very apt analogy. Experiences and memories aren’t like money, you can enjoy them both now and later. The best I can do is to cherish all my experiences, and all my memories, as if they are rare treasures. Which of course they are, no matter how perfect one’s memory is. Happy Thanksgiving.
I’ve been musing on memory lately because I just read a novel that had memory, and the loss of it, at its core: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It was a 2019 National Book Award finalist, described on Goodreads as a “hypnotic, gentle novel that begins as a surveillance-state dystopia, and ends as something more existential: a surreal and haunting meditation on our sense of self.”
The book is all that, and I enjoyed reading it, but I can’t recommend it without a caution. You know how when you’re reading Japanese fantastical fiction or watching a Japanese movie, even while part of you is enjoying the show, another part is hoping the story doesn’t get all melancholy and creepy by the end, like Japanese fiction sometimes does? Well, this is one of those stories that gets that way. But it sure held my attention!
Here’s a book with a theme of remembering and forgetting that I can recommend whole-heartedly: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (the same Brit who wrote The Remains of the Day). It an easy and fairly short book (maybe 300 pages), and it reads like a dreamy adventure story from Dark Ages England. An old man and his wife decide to go on a trip to visit their son whom they are having trouble remembering, and have all sorts of natural and supernatural experiences on the way. Reading it was an unmitigated pleasure, like listening to the retelling of a thousand-year old myth. Get this one from the library and enjoy it!!
And since I seem now to be writing about loss-of-memory fantasy stories, let me mention two movies I’ve enjoyed over the years. If you missed these, you should catch them on Netflix.
The first is Memento (2000), a noir thriller about a man trying to hunt down the man who murdered his wife in an attack that also left him unable to hold onto any new memories for more than a few minutes. It’s fascinating to see how he even manages to survive, much less conduct a murder investigation, and to see how the people around him enable or exploit him for their own ends. The movie plays out in anti-chronological order, so the audience experiences something of the same continual disorientation that the hero is going through.
The other is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which was also excellent even though it starred Jim Carrey. It’s a love story of what can go right and wrong when technology is invented that allows surgical removal of unhappy romantic memories, and how hard someone can fight for memories they value.
I like stories of people trying to remember, or sometimes trying to forget, perhaps because of my own challenges. Do you have a favorite remembering or forgetting story, your own or someone else’s? I’d love to hear it.
Thanks,
Dorn
12/4/2019