Memory, p.15
Memory, page 15
This of course is the Mole from The Wind in the Willows (1908), trudging along one freezing December night on his way back to Ratty’s snug, riverside burrow, when suddenly ambushed by olfactory memory. He too does not know for some moments what he is smelling, only that its associations are bewilderingly strong. Then finally comes ‘recollection in the fullest flood’. What he is smelling is ‘Home!’ and his own past life there (back in the spring). ‘Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him in the darkness!’
Smell can be piercingly direct in its transporting power. In his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), Rudyard Kipling describes a particular pungent kind of woodsmoke, made up of burning tar, old ammunition boxes and railway-sleepers, with which he says he could move an entire battalion of men to the veldt of South Africa, by reactivating their memories of the Boer War. Yet the precise action of smell on the human memory still remains mysterious.
In 2004 the Nobel Prize for Physiology was presented to two American scientists, Richard Axel and Linda Buck, for a brilliant paper on the connection between the nose and the brain. They established that the human nose has nearly a thousand separate ‘receptors’ (ten times more than a fish, though forty times less than a dog). These have complex connections with the cortex, involving no less than 3 per cent of our genes. They form unique clusters or ‘olfactory patterns’, which are capable of holding ‘memories of approximately 10,000 different odours’, a truly astonishing resource. Yet when asked, in the course of an interview on BBC World Service, what light their prize-winning work threw on Proust’s experience, Richard Axel answered simply: ‘None at all’.fn16
[11]
In her popular science book, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (1997) Susan Greenfield concludes, in a way that David Hartley would surely have recognised, that ‘Memory is a cornerstone of the mind’. But writing as a Professor of Pharmacology, she still emphasises how little can be said definitely about the relationship between its ‘phenomenological and physical’ functioning. There is no generally accepted theory of how the brain produces the mind, or the mind generates consciousness, or of how consciousness depends on memory. The human brain has 100 billion cells, and their infinitely complex interaction remains much more mysterious than the functioning of an entire galactic star system. Perhaps there is something oddly reassuring about this.
Neurological experiments have proved that there is a short-term memory (which seems to be connected to the hippocampus and lasts up to thirty minutes). There is also a separate long-term memory which may last over ninety years, and seems to be distributed throughout the cerebral cortex. Amazing feats of memory have also been accurately studied and measured in the performance of chess-players, musicians, actors, sports aficionados (entire Wisdens committed to memory), or autistic patients. One recalls the Memory Man in the film of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935, Alfred Hitchcock, but not in fact in the original novel of 1915).
Nevertheless, the actual way a single discrete memory (if there is such a thing) is ‘recorded’ in the human brain remains bafflingly obscure. Writing of Wilder Penfield’s open-brain surgical experiments in Canada, Greenfield observes, ‘The clinical cases reported by Penfield would also suggest that memory is not stored simply: it is not laid down directly in the brain. Rather, as seen in Penfield’s studies, a cache of memories would be more like a nebulous series of dreams. One immediate problem was that the memories themselves were not like highly specific recordings on a video and were a far cry from the memories on a computer. Another problem was that if the same area was stimulated by Penfield on different occasions, different memories were elicited. Conversely, the same memories could be generated from stimulating different areas. No one has yet shown definitively how these phenomena can be explained in terms of brain functioning.’fn17
Nevertheless, the basis of all memory still seems to be conceived as the establishment of ‘associations’ through clusters or ‘networks’ of neuronal links. ‘We know that long-term memory is accompanied by an increase in the number of presynaptic terminals, and we know that memory involves establishing new associations.’fn18
Chemical transmitters, voltage changes and synaptic ‘circuits’ have partly replaced Hartley’s speculative ‘vibrations’, although the old imagery of flood and drought is still hauntingly present. Explaining the role of calcium in forming a neuronal connection, Greenfield writes of the glutamate receptor cell ‘opening the channel for calcium ions to flood in’, and subsequently of the ‘large influx of calcium’ strengthening the synapse by releasing ‘a chemical cascade within the target cell’.fn19
Neuroscience also recognises many types of forgetting, though most of these are pathological. They include numerous kinds of brain damage; various forms of post-traumatic amnesia; Korsakoff’s syndrome (based on severe dietary deficiency); alcoholic blackouts and lapses; Wernicke’s aphasia in which speech itself is unlearned; Parkinson’s (in which the brain forgets physical co-ordination); and of course Alzheimer’s, which is not a natural consequence of old age, but a very specific degenerative disease of the medial temporal lobe.fn20
Forgetting as a more positive, constructive, or even healing process – both for individuals and for whole societies – receives scant attention. So does the ‘benign protective amnesia’ of old age, as reflected in Groucho Marx’s memorable aside: ‘I never forget a face, but in your case I am prepared to make an exception.’
[12]
Old age brings one particularly enigmatic feature of the lifelong exchange between Memory and Forgetting. It is the striking, but apparently paradoxical fact that, as old people begin to forget their immediate past, they often begin to remember their distant childhood with startling vividness. What possible metaphysical or physiological explanation can be given for this phenomenon?
Susan Greenfield calls it, among all the common processes of human memory, ‘the most mysterious issue of all’. Characteristically, she sees the problem in terms of cellular loss and renewal. ‘We know that some people can remember what happened to them ninety years ago, but by then every molecule in their body will have been turned over many times. If long-term changes mediating memories are occurring continuously in the brain, how are they sustained?’fn21
This paradox had already been observed by Leonardo da Vinci, in one of his Notebooks known as the Codex Atlanticus, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. ‘Things that happened many years ago often seem close and proximate to the present time, and many things that happened recently seem as ancient as the long-gone days of youth.’fn22
Coleridge saw the problem in psychological terms. He suggested shrewdly that memories of childhood had a high visual content, with strong associated moods, but lacked linguistic or spoken elements. ‘If I were asked how it is that very old people remember visually only the events of early childhood, and remember the intervening spaces either not at all or only verbally, I should think it a perfectly philosophical answer that old age remembers childhood by becoming a second childhood!’
He expanded this in a letter to his friend Robert Southey in August 1803. ‘I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than in trains of ideas; that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this.’ He added that if flows of feelings, rather than discrete chains of ideas, formed the essential structure of memory, then Hartley’s system was too atomistic and passive: ‘Hartley’s system totters.’fn23
In fact Coleridge came to consider (like Bergson, like Proust) that perhaps nothing was really ever forgotten. Perhaps movements of feeling, vibrations of emotion, were capable of resurrecting almost anything from our past lives. ‘For what is Forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or bodily Feeling, same or similar – sometimes dimly similar – and instantly the trains of forgotten thought rise up from their living Catacombs!’fn24
[13]
Yet in the Preface to his unfinished ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), Coleridge described the most famous incident of creative forgetting in English literature. Retired to a lonely farmhouse near Exmoor in the autumn of 1797, he took opium and dreamed a poem of ‘not less than from two to three hundred lines’. On awaking, he wrote down the first 54 lines (as we now know ‘Kubla Khan’) but was interrupted by ‘a person on business from Porlock’. He could never recall the rest of the poem.
The analogy Coleridge uses for this moment of forgetfulness is, once again, water. ‘… On his return to his room, [he] found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!’
Most modern critics and biographers think that Coleridge invented the Person on business from Porlock, to hide the fact that he simply could not finish the poem. But I think he was visited first by Mnemosyne, and then by the other goddess. It was just that he could not remember her name.
Part II
… fragilis hominum memoria recedit et traditio litterarum semper ad memoriam reducit.
… the frail memory of man slips away and the written record always restores memory.
Charter of King Alfred
Introduction
Harriet Harvey Wood
Dennis Enright, himself a great anthologist, once remarked that for every existing anthology there are at least four other possible anthologies – things uncollected, directions not followed. We have come to the order and arrangement of ours after much thought and discussion – we are very aware of how much has been excluded because we had no more space, or not included because we hadn’t found it.
We have concentrated on the writings of the western world, starting with Plato and ending close to the work of the present day, though we realise that new publications on the subject appear monthly, almost daily. We have been involved in a kind of White Queen race, running hard to stay in the same place. Aristotle made a good point, when, in the first book devoted to the subject, he made a distinction between memory and reminiscence, and on the whole, we have tried to observe his distinction and given priority to extracts which illustrate the ways in which memory works (and its more notable and extraordinary aberrations) – and also writings which try to define or illustrate what memory is. We have of course also included many reminiscences. Definitions start with illustrations, and reminiscence is a form of human self-definition.
The first section, ‘Childhood Memories’, does consist of reminiscences and was originally called ‘Personal Memories’. We discovered that what we had gathered were all childhood memories, with the clarity and mystery good writers give to early memories. They include John Clare, Sigmund Freud, both the Woolfs and a passage from the autobiography of Eric Kandel, the great student of the biology of memory. All illuminate and are illuminated by the writings in later sections. They are what most people immediately think of when they think of memory. It would have been possible to fill an entire volume with these pieces alone. So many of them are the ones which stick longest in the imagination: Virginia Woolf’s memory of seeing her holiday nursery in Cornwall as if ‘lying in a grape’, Chesterton’s vivid scarlet vision of Cardinal Manning.
Our second section contains extracts partly from what can be thought of as a classical tradition of writings on memory, starting with Plato, Aristotle and St Augustine. It includes Cicero’s story of Simonides, the anonymous Ad Herennium treatise, Kim’s Game from Kipling, and of course Frances Yates on Renaissance Memory Theatres, A.R. Luria’s study of the mind of a mnemonist, and Borges’s classic, ‘Funes the memorious’.
‘Memory and Science’ starts with Aristotle on animals, and ends with Antonio Damasio and Kandel on their research in the neuroscience of memory. It includes classic thinkers and experimental workers like Pavlov and Bartlett. We also included Francis Galton’s eccentric and comical study of his own thought processes. There are examples of the study of animal memory, as it is related to the study of ‘instinct’, with work by Konrad Lorenz and Nicolaas Tinbergen. And we have extracts from the huge and rapidly growing field of the study of the brain itself, from J.Z. Young to Semir Zeki, from Francis Crick to Vilayanur Ramachandran.
‘Memory and Imagination’ includes thinking by writers, artists and others about how we put the imagined world together, and the way the memory works in this process. Proust and Wordsworth are there of course – and we have included Freud in this section, both on screen memories, and in his analysis of a childhood memory Goethe recorded in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. We have two passages from George Eliot, from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, in which it is clear that she is using rooted memories of her own childhood in her art. In Daniel Deronda the absence of such memories is a clue to the unsettled character of Gwendolyn Harleth.
We move from memory as a constructive power to the vexed and fascinating problem of false memories – memories constructed, for all sorts of reasons, which are not memories at all, but lies, or fantasies, or mistakes. And from invented memories we move to a section on the construction of public memory – communal mnemonics as a political act, street names as ‘history’, the ‘official stories’ of states. And we end with ‘Forgetting’ – from Cicero to Billy Collins. We cannot remember well if we have no capacity to forget.
The arrangement within chapters is in general chronological, by date of first publication. This principle has occasionally been abandoned when it resulted in an obvious absurdity, such as the separation of Leonard and Virginia Woolf by nearly half a century owing to the posthumous publication of the latter’s memoirs. In such a case it seemed right to reunite husband and wife. The chronological structure, both in the philosophical and the scientific sections, helped to illustrate the development of research and the interplay of ideas. Sometimes the accident of this arrangement served to highlight unexpectedly serendipitous coincidences, such as the scarlet fever which formed the background of the childhood memories of both Samuel Butler’s Henry Hoare and Leonard Woolf. More significant was the chance neighbourhood, within a couple of pages of each other, of Antonio Damasio’s present-day discussion of what he has described as the ‘as-if-body-loop’ mechanism and a striking illustration of it in the fifteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. Troilus, riding back into Troy, does not recognise his lost love, Cresseid, in the disfigured leperwoman begging for alms, any more than she, blinded by her disease, recognises him. He certainly feels nothing for her; but something in her recalls Cresseid to his mind, and instantly he feels again the love she once inspired. In Damasio’s words, he experiences again ‘the configuration that our body assumed during a particular kind of emotion in the past’.
General themes emerge throughout the book. There is the development through time and technological improvements of metaphors for the memory, from the wax tablet of Plato’s day (remarkably persistent over 2000 years) through St Augustine’s university library and Locke’s blank slate to the card index and computer technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now we have audio and video tape recorders and digital cameras (as in the phrase, ‘snapshot memories’), all used as metaphors for the act of memory, all promoting the very questionable idea, addressed by Ulric Neisser in part I, that an incorruptible memory of an event can be preserved.
Our collection shows memory as storytelling. We form memories into stories as we remember, and we polish the stories. The childhood memories that we take with us into later life are what define us to ourselves: they make us understand that, as Anthony Powell puts it, ‘I was me’. The accuracy of what we remember is in a sense secondary. For most of us, our childhood memories are happy memories, to be looked back at with nostalgia, whether they have the dreamlike quality of which de Quincey writes or the sharp clarity of G.K. Chesterton. Most of the childhood memories here are happy ones. For some, like D.H. Lawrence, to remember childhood from a painful present is distressing. The classic statement of memory as pain is Francesca’s words to Dante from the whirlwind in Hell, remembering young, adulterous love. ‘Nessun maggior dolor che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria’; there is no greater grief than to remember happy times when one is in misery. But for most of us such memories, sad, happy, nostalgic, are our validation of ourselves, of our place in the world, of the roots that tie us to it.
It does not seem to matter that such memories are frequently inaccurate and that those who profess to remember them in many cases know them to be inaccurate. As William Maxwell says, ‘In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw’. If there is near unanimity on the extent to which these early memories are responsible for a sense of identity, there is also a general acknowledgement of the fact of their unreliability. What matters to their owners is what is significant. Gabriel Garcia Marquez summarises it well: ‘Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.’ The recognition of the different parallax from which a different member of a family or a group will recall a common experience will account for some variation in the retelling of it; I was recently told of a childhood event in which three children took part, all of whom in later life recalled it quite differently. But there is also a conscious element of continuous story-telling in which a significant memory is constructed and developed in the mind, or in which a number of flashes of early memory interact with each other to produce an artefact which may not be strictly true but which, perhaps because it is composed of ingredients which are, answers a need. Some such need underlies the screen memories of which Freud wrote so memorably.
