Thinking, Remembering, Rethinking
I often half-joke that, when smartphones were invented, the parts of our brains that keep track of phone numbers atrophied; because we didn’t need to know phone numbers anymore, we lost the ability to store them—except in our phones’ contact lists.
It has always been thus.
In fact, while ancient Athens was becoming literate, Socrates railed against the new technology. He believed that, once people could move their thoughts onto paper, they would no longer keep them in their heads. In a way, he was right. Paper literacy made oral literacy (and the prodigious memory it required) obsolete.
Good luck finding someone who can recite The Iliad from memory, today.
Ironically, the only reason we know about Socrates (and his luddite concerns about literacy) is that Plato chose to write them down for us. Of course, Socrates’ idea of thinking was based on memory, while we believe that thinking is what we do with data—which might, or might not, reside inside our crania.
It’s no longer important to us. Still, memory is useful—even if we don’t trust it—because even altered memories make us who we are.
The following essays appeared in The Digressions of Dr Sanscravat: Gastronomical Ramblings & Other Diversions:
What Memory Tells Us
The radio, this morning, asked for listener responses to a presumably simple question: “What is your earliest memory?” I had an answer ready, but was in the car and—while I may not respect all traffic laws—cell phones make bad driving partners. So, instead of jabbering away on the radio, I distracted myself with thoughts of remembering.
Anyone with functioning eyes and ears knows that memoirs have become very big in the past few years. This can be partially explained by the fact that the Baby Boomers have reached an age where they have something to look back upon, and are beginning to realize that their memories may soon go the way of the dodo and passenger pigeon. Clearly, ego has a lot to do with the phenomenon, but ego has a lot to do with all writing, doesn’t it?
What memory does for memoir writers is the same as what it does for fiction writers (two genres not overly dependent upon adherence to the facts): it helps writers to learn something they don’t already know.
We all have these little snippets of memory, catalogued in our heads with short tags, such as “I was in the hospital.” We often make the mistake of thinking that the tag is the entire memory. When we start to write about it, however, all the collateral parts of the experience, the location, the people, the time, the season, the smell, the complete texture of the experience, become visible again. Those tags are merely entries in an index, an index that allows us to access everything—but only when we consciously revisit it through writing.
The other thing that memoir writing does—if we let it—is help us consider why we remember certain things and what, if anything, tiny fragments of our past tell us about who we are in the present. Which brings me—after all this digression, fascinating as it is—to my own earliest memory.
The mind, as Steven Pinker believes, is not made of language—even though we use language to describe what goes on there. So much is non-verbal, that Pinker is surprised that language works as well as it does. We have heaps and heaps of memory fragments, most of which have nothing to do with words. They are strung together according to a logic is mostly inexplicable to us. The string that permits me to access my earliest memory is a series of events from my childhood—each somewhat traumatic from a child’s point of view—that occurred in a single location.
When I was about eight or nine, I went into the hospital to have my appendix removed. The first bed I occupied, before surgery, was in a dimly lit hallway, its floor covered in large black and white tiles. As soon as I looked down, those tiles brought back a memory of the previous time I had been there—when, at age three, I had my tonsils removed (apparently, I came from the baby factory with superfluous parts).
Revisiting that memory, I remembered seeing those tiles even earlier.
I had been in that same hall, when I was eighteen months old (with bronchial pneumonia). I had been in a crib, complete with wooden bars to keep me from falling out. I recall putting my head through those bars, and looking down. On those black and white tiles, just below me—but definitely out of reach—was a single green Lifesaver.
To this day, the memory of that unattainable candy—complete with its fully-imagined artificial lime flavor and aroma—remains vivid.
What keeps the memory so fresh? Somehow, a child’s dread of being left alone in a strange place has become attached to the longing for candy I could not reach. I don’t the recall the terror itself, but it must have been part of the experience.
No part of this string of memories is verbal. It is only now, in replay, that the details are committed to words. No one else is there, the scene is profoundly graphic—with its bold composition in black, white, and green—and what holds it all together is an imagined flavor, a longing for unattainable gastronomic delight.
The fact that I’ve spent much of my life as a visual artist, only to leave it to become a food writer (both occupations which require long stretches of time alone with one’s thoughts), I leave for the amusement of those who are inclined to psychological speculation. Whether that early experience motivated what came later, or if the longing that led to the memory being preserved was already part of what I am, remains terra incognita.
Memory and Medusa
Writers live in their memories. Externally, they often appear to be doing nothing at all, staring into the void, seemingly oblivious to the outside world—and, in a sense, they are. They are absent, in the same way that an aborigine, on walkabout, is absent from his community. Writers leave for much the same reason as our hypothetical aborigine, for their internal journeys allow them to create themselves and, in turn, the writings that are them.
There’s a famous passage in Moby Dick, “The Try Works,” where Melville describes the Pequod’s furnaces, where whale blubber is rendered. At a certain point in the process, there’s no need to consume precious wood to keep the fires going—the whale’s bones themselves become the fuel used to extract whale oil. At that moment, Melville chooses to quote John Webster, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries: “Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.”
That is what writers do with memories—whether they are their own, those of their friends, or from the books they’ve read. The dust they use to cut and polish themselves, and their writing, is no more than themselves, the stuff they’ve stored away in their brains. In the internal try works, they turn memories over, again and again, slowly stewing them ‘til they have reduced themselves to pure oil.
However, a curious thing happens to the memories themselves in the process. Like Melville’s blubber, they cease to exist once the oil has been extracted.
Our memories remain alive because every time we revisit them we add tiny bits of experience we’ve accumulated since our last visit. A memory exists, as a memory, specifically because of its malleability; it transforms itself along with us. Once written, it is no longer a living memory—it becomes writing: it’s static, unchanging, even—if not literally—carved-in-stone. Having gazed at the face of the gorgon, memories become lithified by our stare.
As writers, we feel a twinge of remorse at the loss of our memories, as they are no longer the vibrant living things that attracted us to them in the first place. Ironically, a memory we capture in our writing—no longer alive for us—can now become part of the living memory of readers, where it is once again free to transmute itself endlessly.
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