I often wonder how a memory dies, how we forget something, more often than I wonder how we remember. What’s more, I’ve been considering lately if these two things are more closely related than they seem at first, that they’re not so mutually exclusive as we think they are.
There is one kind of forgetting that seems to be nothing more than misplaced information. We see a face and can’t remember the name, or pick up a telephone and can’t remember the number we want to call. This is simply a failure to remember. We know we have the information, it is somewhere in our mind, but we don’t know where in our mind. In a similar manner we lose things, or can’t find them. We know the object is still somewhere in our house, that it hasn’t disappeared or ceased to exist, even though we look everywhere for it.
There is another kind of forgetting: when we abandon a memory, do not keep it alive in our mind. This is temporary, because one day, perhaps even decades later, you remember it again, usually involuntarily. Once, for example, V. jokingly used a Greek expression that is often used with children, an expression I had not heard for many, many years, and as soon as I heard it, I realised that in the decades that had passed since I had last heard it, I had not even once thought about it. And yet, there it was, suddenly presenting itself, suddenly appearing, summoned before I myself knew it had been summoned.
(I find the experience of saying I have not thought of this at all in x years very strange, although I can’t quite explain why.)
I have a memory of walking down the hall of the apartment where we lived until I was two years old. I see the living room as I enter it. A small white television set is on the floor, a black and white football game on the screen. I think I remember my father lying on the floor with his head resting on the green couch. I remember another time, in the same apartment, being taken from my crib and being carried — probably by my mother, but perhaps by another woman — and being taken out into the hall, where a group of people are leaving. The light hurts my eyes. One woman has a sort of beehive hairdo and is wearing horn-rimmed glasses. I am the centre of attention, although I am grumpy and don’t want to be. I don’t know how much of this is accurate. I may be embellishing.
It once occurred to me that I was keeping these memories alive simply by thinking about them again, by bringing them to life again and again, by running these short films over and over again, and that I was actually remembering the last time I remembered them, the last time I’d brought up the images. Remembering may be like a relay, the passing of a baton: the initial memory may have died a long time ago. I cannot remember the event itself, as I did the first time I remembered it. I only remember the last few recreations of the memory, the last recall, and I don’t know how much the memory is embellished or how much it loses and becomes poorer as time goes by and I keep recalling.
There is yet a third kind of forgetting, similar to the second, where we stop thinking about something, where we forget that we ever knew something, but unlike the second kind, we never have any occasion to remember it again. The possibility of remembering remains forever unfulfilled.
This is the darkest oblivion, and I find it oddly frightening, I suppose because my mind cannot fathom it. How can I imagine something I have forgotten without also at least imagining that I have remembered it?
Funny how all writers seem to have fantastic memories… I, on the other hand, am also fascinated by what we forget, but mostly because there is so much I can’t remember. Everything from before the age of 6 is a blank, except for a couple of faded postcard-like stills… a basket of stuffed animals, the view out of my grandparents window… and even the years following that are hazy and somehow unreal – more recollections of the recollection, as you say, than of the real thing – until some point in my teens when I must have snapped awake and started taking proper notice of my surroundings… though perhaps I’ve chosen to block out my memories of those years as a good many of them are probably better off forgotten. Either way I find it truly frightening that there are huge chunks of my life that I might as well not have lived.
But what your post really reminded me of was a morning a couple of years ago when I sat up in bed with a fully formed and detailed memory in my head, of a house my mother and I had boarded in with an asian woman and her teen-aged son, when I was around 7. There was nothing remarkable about the house, the woman, or her son, the stay had been relatively brief, and nothing had happened in the preceding days to jog such a memory, and yet here I was with sudden perfect recall of the entire situation whereas the night before I’d had absolutely no recall of it whatsoever. At first I thought I’d just dreamt the whole thing, but a phone call to my mother confirmed that my recollections were entirely correct. Now how does one explain that? Will the rest of my life start coming back to me in bits and pieces, until, perhaps by the age of 80 when I will no longer be able to remember the day to day facts of life, I’ll have reassembled the whole picture?
What about the memories which we wish to recall? Some times just sitting and pondering the idea of what it is we wish to recall, either a command on a computer program (one not used in a long while) or the location of a misplaced paper, diagram, page in a book, vocabulary word, etcetera.
Have you ever had someone ask you a question and tried so hard to find the answer in the recesses of your brain? As if squinting and flexing your brain-muscle would somehow squeeze the information back to the forefront of your conciousness and make it materialize into words your mouth could speak.
But what happens when someone poses a question to you and you can’t remember it on the spot, but as soon as the person leaves, you recall the information most readily? Maybe moments later, weeks, months, years?
I laugh because recalling happens at the most odd times as described above. Walking a familiar path or a season’s recognizable smells usually bring up memories that would never be freed from wherever they are being stored.
When I watch Jeopardy, I swear I would get half of the answers correct if only given more time. But that’s what makes the show interesting, right? The ability to recall the information, no matter how deep it is lodged in a memory, quickly to present it in the form of a question.
One night, while i was in bed, trying to go to sleep… I was thinking of some things, as i usually do. Things that took place that day, different situations.
As i was thinking of a problem I had that day, trying to find a solution to it… I stopped for a few seconds and thought about absolutely nothing… After that, I couldn’t remember what I was thinking about that few seconds earlier. It happend about 3 or 4 times… I struggled to remember what I was thinking about, but i couldn’t. It kind of scared me.
So, what about this kind of forgetting?
The difference between the kinds of forgetting is basically a question of how we remember. The first one I mentioned was the inability to remember something we need at a particular moment. The second was something that you forget until you involuntarily remember it at some point. The third one is something that you forget forever. It just disappears.
Forgetting is the same. Did you eventually remember what you’d been thinking about? If so, it’s the first kind. Did what you had been thinking about come to you on its own later on? Then it’s the second.
If it was the third, you wouldn’t even be able to talk about it now. You obviously remember some of it now, if you can describe it.