Borges once wrote a story about a man of prodigious memory, one who could recollect without the slightest effort every single event of his past and every single perception or idea that assailed his senses and his intellect. So much so, that in order to recreate the happenings of a single day, he needed an entire day. The story moves on; the protagonist dies of lung cancer, as he spends his days smoking and remembering in front of his bedroom window.
In a sense, this naive fantasy defines memory as remembrance or recollection: the metaphors are borrowed from the world of manual labour. Gather, collect, bring back. Rediscover, as in unearth, exhume, drag into the surface. The material lies hidden or trapped. The endeavour lies in bringing it to the light.
On a deeper level, the story exhibits certain preconceptions common to the western literary world, regarding the nature of the self: the subject as something concrete and specific, the ego as unalterable identity, forever encaged within the confines of its being. Of course, this is not stated and yet, goes without saying: to remember, is to assume the unalterability of the self, the persistence of the subject through time. I can only recollect my own memories and that is made possible because my essence was the same then, as is now.
Layers of assumed a prioris and a network of misguided connections, between identity and memory, between the self and the world, between the subject and the object. A treatise on memory as basically a vindication of a naive realism.
Let's derail this train of thought by - first of all- redefining memory as interpretation and not recollection. As recreation and not regathering. What does it mean, to remember an event? Of what does this effort consist? What is an image to the memory of an image or a smell to the attempt to restate its effect?
St. Augustine's Confessions are mainly comprised of the efforts of a single man to come to terms with his past. His purpose is didactic: observe, and learn from my mistakes. Augustine takes no pleasure in remembering his sinful youth. He does not actually remember the guilty pleasure of stealing an apple from someone's apple tree; he remembers what was (or must have been) pleasurable, with guilt. And that makes all the difference. His attempts to judge his past actions are done through a prism he acquired later in life. Augustine does not remember stealing an apple. He remembers that he stole an apple. The man and the boy are two distinct moral entities. Augustine was baptized and hence, reborn. A new person. He cannot have memories of who he was, since the person he was is dead and buried. He recounts his past as one would when narrating the adventures of another. Passing judgment and yet, detached.
2
This sort of detachment from one's past actions, thoughts and initiatives already marks a split in the core of the self. It resembles a self-induced amnesia. It is not a case of selective memory, but rather a transformation of the person to such an extent, that memories can no longer be associated with their subject. The guilt or the elation involved in the process of recollection means nothing. These are a posteriori dressings, the feelings of the judge and not those of the accused.
A moral metamorphosis is a re-invention of the self: the newborn has no outstanding accounts. No personal history. No past and hence no memories. To remember who you once were requires a transgression of the being you have become, a self-evident impossibility. Or at least, a transposition of your present worldview upon your past. Which is of course, what Augustine does: with absolution within his grasp, he looks down and chastises and moralizes. He is not concerned with the repercussions of this past. He is thankful that it's his past and not his present. Because, in the truest sense of the word, his past is not his own.
In a sense, this naive fantasy defines memory as remembrance or recollection: the metaphors are borrowed from the world of manual labour. Gather, collect, bring back. Rediscover, as in unearth, exhume, drag into the surface. The material lies hidden or trapped. The endeavour lies in bringing it to the light.
On a deeper level, the story exhibits certain preconceptions common to the western literary world, regarding the nature of the self: the subject as something concrete and specific, the ego as unalterable identity, forever encaged within the confines of its being. Of course, this is not stated and yet, goes without saying: to remember, is to assume the unalterability of the self, the persistence of the subject through time. I can only recollect my own memories and that is made possible because my essence was the same then, as is now.
Layers of assumed a prioris and a network of misguided connections, between identity and memory, between the self and the world, between the subject and the object. A treatise on memory as basically a vindication of a naive realism.
Let's derail this train of thought by - first of all- redefining memory as interpretation and not recollection. As recreation and not regathering. What does it mean, to remember an event? Of what does this effort consist? What is an image to the memory of an image or a smell to the attempt to restate its effect?
St. Augustine's Confessions are mainly comprised of the efforts of a single man to come to terms with his past. His purpose is didactic: observe, and learn from my mistakes. Augustine takes no pleasure in remembering his sinful youth. He does not actually remember the guilty pleasure of stealing an apple from someone's apple tree; he remembers what was (or must have been) pleasurable, with guilt. And that makes all the difference. His attempts to judge his past actions are done through a prism he acquired later in life. Augustine does not remember stealing an apple. He remembers that he stole an apple. The man and the boy are two distinct moral entities. Augustine was baptized and hence, reborn. A new person. He cannot have memories of who he was, since the person he was is dead and buried. He recounts his past as one would when narrating the adventures of another. Passing judgment and yet, detached.
2
This sort of detachment from one's past actions, thoughts and initiatives already marks a split in the core of the self. It resembles a self-induced amnesia. It is not a case of selective memory, but rather a transformation of the person to such an extent, that memories can no longer be associated with their subject. The guilt or the elation involved in the process of recollection means nothing. These are a posteriori dressings, the feelings of the judge and not those of the accused.
A moral metamorphosis is a re-invention of the self: the newborn has no outstanding accounts. No personal history. No past and hence no memories. To remember who you once were requires a transgression of the being you have become, a self-evident impossibility. Or at least, a transposition of your present worldview upon your past. Which is of course, what Augustine does: with absolution within his grasp, he looks down and chastises and moralizes. He is not concerned with the repercussions of this past. He is thankful that it's his past and not his present. Because, in the truest sense of the word, his past is not his own.
A religious awakening has on memory almost the same effect as a psychotic episode. And that happens because both eventualities attack one's most innermost retreat: one's sense of identity. A severe schizophrenic beholds his image in the mirror and does not recognize it as his own. A reborn Christian beholds his past through the prism of his new found faith, without essentially recognizing it. They both identify themselves with a complete disregard for their past image.
The connection between psychological disturbance and memory loss lies not as much in the new topography of the brain, as it does in the plateau designated between the new form of perception and the new definition of identity: insanity restructures stimuli perception, behavioural patterns and self awareness. In exactly the same way religion does. One can almost treat religion as a form of insanity.
3
An amnesiac will get depressed, like any other, out of a sense of failure: the failure to identify or self define. And like anyone else suffering from depression he can exit the pit by rationalizing. Only in the amnesiac's case, that requires more than just the invention of a future. It also takes inventing a past.
Recovering amnesiacs will delude themselves with pseudo-memories, the result of others' accounts and their own self-fulfilling prophecies. Narrations, dreams, suspicions of familiarity - these will be the building blocks of the past.
4
I came across Feyerabend's autobiography, and as is the case with philosophers' autobiographies, its form reveals more than its content. He begins by explaining how it was only recently that he acquired an interest for his roots and early years. He sets off by asking about his parents, who were those people that taught him a language and a way to view the world...
And already, a problem. Feyerabend writes his memoires in English, not German. Yet he recounts thoughts and feelings and intentions of a time before English was available to him. Can such an experiment be valid? Can one remember in a certain language a thought formed in another? What is the value or validity of my own little experiment, explaining in a language that is not my own my thoughts on the nature of memory, when my own ability to recollect is severely impaired?
5
My earliest memories revolve around a time when I could actually drag even earlier memories into the surface, so in a sense, I remember a time when I remembered. These recollections - if such a term is applicable- refer to maybe a couple of years before my adolescence, when abstract thinking was not yet within my grasp and I could absorb without having to filter everything through numerous layers of interpretation. As a 12-year old, I could remember clearly as far back as kindergarten and suspected memories of a time even before that, although they were very vague in their imagery and the feelings they evoked. So after a process of repetition, I can still narrate events of my childhood, without actually remembering, but recounting with the certainty that if the words are there, it's unimportant that the images can no longer be restored. Because in all honesty, I remember fuck all. I can say to you, one day, in primary school, my teacher slapped me in the face and made me stand in the corner during the geography lesson, because I was making too much noise. The words are familiar, repeated to me by others, repeated to myself by myself, but the memory is actually absent. I have a mental image of me standing in a corner, but this is probably a pseudo memory, an abstraction out of all the corners in all the classrooms I have seen in my life. The teacher was a young woman. But her image eludes me. Did I stand for the whole class, or just a few minutes? And at the end of the day, is this a memory, or a very vague mental recreation of a story repeated through various sources and delivered from different perspectives through the years?
I cannot remember many things from a time when my face was very different and my body much smaller. My world was different back then. I can say, I remember hiding under the table in the dinning room and my parents trying to get me to stand up. But I don't actually remember. It makes sense that I would be hiding there and there is a picture forming in my head, of me crouching under the table, whose exact shape or colour I find impossible to recollect, but that is also what probably remains after having crawled under tables for a number of times throughout a number of years.
There are no memories of singular events. Only the echoes of actions repeated and recounted.
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