Memory

“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”

― Antonio Porchia

That quote may seem too simplistic or even puzzling but it is packed with a unique insight into our lives. Animals do not worry about how they will be remembered because their basic needs are food, survival and reproduction and their memory revolves around those and nothing more.  We, on the other hand, have a philosophical need to first of all know ourselves and to be known by others.  We as individuals have a fervent view of ourselves but outside of it, everything about us resides in the memory of other people.  If our lives are to be summarized when we’re long gone, we are merely an aggregated hologram made up by and coming from how people remember us.

One of the saddest, if not the most profoundly sorrowful, condition in the human experience is the loss of one’s memory due to dementia or worst – Alzheimer; or to see it happen to someone we know, and more so to a loved one.  Let’s set that aside for the moment.

….

“When the dawn comes

Tonight will be a memory too

And a new day will begin”

That is a portion of one stanza from the award winning Broadway musical, “Cats”.  Unfortunately, that’s about the only song I could remember from it.  And lest we forget, all the singing was done by cats.  Hardly would we associate “memory” with cats but it would have been a little harder to make the musical with elephants on stage.  Elephants are known for their extraordinary memory, we are told, but they have large brains; however, even for crocodiles whose brains are supposed to be the size of walnuts, they too depend on memory for survival. 

There is more to memory than memory itself.

We all know, of course, how important memory is. It is memory that gets high school students through SATs, what a matriarchal elephant has to lead her herd to the next water hole, how penguins recognize one from the other when they definitely all look alike, how we find our car after a ball game in a ten acre parking lot, and so on and on.  It is quite a remarkable feat considering that we often don’t think too much, or at least we do it so effortlessly as to not even be aware of how our brain does it.  That is, when all goes well.  How often do we tap our forehead with our palm to remember something, to connect a name to a face, remember that quaint restaurant, or who won last year’s Wimbledon men singles championship?  Yet, we’re told it’s all in there somewhere in the deep recesses of the complex labyrinthine tissues of our brain.

How could we really, when we’re also told that perhaps we have as many as 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses.  How do we account for all the activities that go on inside our head? A synapse is one connection between two adjoining neurons.  As these synapses occur, we can imagine traffic signals blinking on and off at trillions of intersections and somewhere in our brain something is sorting them all out, coding what the signals were at a particular time, framing the groups of yellow, green and red lights, and somehow allow their sequences to mean something when they are reviewed later.  We’re told the hippocampus of the brain does all that coding and structuring and segregating them into short and long term memories. 

Memory is such a tricky thing to manage, if it can be managed at all.  We have no trouble dialing a phone number from a piece of paper but once we’re done with the call hardly can we remember the number we just called, unless we look at the piece of paper again.  At a party we could still be talking to the person we’ve just been introduced to but suddenly we’d draw a blank about his or her name. Yet, we have no trouble recalling the name of our favorite teacher in high school decades ago. Some of us can still remember what it felt like when we saw our first crush, although we may not remember his or her name, walking down the hall way, crossing the street, or catching a first glance, a smile, or hear the laughter.

Memory, the way we remember, contrary to what we hope it can do, is dishearteningly unreliable under certain circumstances because it is well known that eye-witness accounts are the least dependable of all the available evidentiary tools. We’re aware too of selective memories. It is a popular joke among husbands who proclaim they do not need to remember the bad things they did because their wives will recall it for them. Those among us (husbands) who think that’s funny, beware of outsourcing such memories because it is fraught with potentially perilous repercussions. Our spouses’ memory of our past transgressions can be severe or slightly endearing depending on what brought it about. If you presently committed another stupid act, the severity of a past mistake is multiplied in the manner that Archimedes would have been proud of when he was contemplating the power of his compound pulley. 

That is why memory could be tricky, sometimes.  According to one expert, “memory is not retrieved from a storage system the way a file is read off a hard disk. Instead memory is reconstructed using an associative neural network process that is not yet understood”.  In other words, memory is in the mind of the beholder where it can be influenced by subsequent experiences after the event or even by factors already in someone’s head prior to the witnessed episode.  We are talking here about recollection of events.  Obviously, memories for mathematical formulas, poetry, and the response to a clue in “Jeopardy” are cast in rigid forms as to not have any misattributions.  We can’t worry about this too much – that’s what books and Google can handle.

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“To be able to forget means sanity.”

― Jack London, The Star Rover

The preceding quotes define from many different points of view what memory means.  Forgetting is almost essential for complete forgiving because not being able to do so is a burden too heavy to carry around.  Jack London is right.  Forgetting could mean making room for other good memories, it could also be that a fresh look at something we’ve heard or felt before is redefined, sometimes more deeply the second or third time around, to fit the circumstances presently.  Our love for the person is almost always about forgetting their faults and remembering everything good about them and what they’ve done. 

One sweet story that has been around is unforgettable.  It is about a husband who visits his wife who suffers from Alzheimer regularly at the nursing home.  At one time a friend asked him why he does it with such regularity when his wife does not even remember him anymore.  His reply was simply but profoundly beautiful, “Because even though she may not remember me I do remember her.”