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?
Anatomy of Melancholy 