Memory, p.41
Memory, page 41
Naturally, I thought about the significance of what I was doing, and asked myself, ‘Now, really, what are you about? You are building a small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!’ I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.
This sort of thing has been consistent with me, and at any time in my later life when I came up against a blank wall, I painted a picture or hewed stone. Each such experience proved to be a rite d’entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it. Everything that I have written this yearfn5 and last year, ‘The Undiscovered Self,’ ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth,’ ‘A Psychological View of Conscience,’ has grown out of the stone sculptures I did after my wife’s death.fn6 The close of life, the end, and what it made me realise, wrenched me violently out of myself. It cost me a great deal to regain my footing, and contact with stone helped me.
From ESTHER SALAMAN, A Collection of Moments: A Study of Involuntary Memories (1970)
A vast amount of information is stowed away in our brain; that much we know for certain. There is a great variety in the faculty of memory: verbal, musical, mathematical, sculptural, a memory for chess configurations, for faces, names, habits, customs, and so on. Very often a person excels in one and not in the others. From observation alone we can tell that children of very similar IQ have very different kinds of memory. The memory for experiences is as common as any of the other kinds, but varies from person to person. Let anyone confine himself to a particular period, preferably to one before he settled down, in youth, adolescence, or childhood, and he will find a number of memories available to him. If he concentrates he will find that many more come back, and even make him wonder how he could have forgotten them …
To show how elusive involuntary memories are I will go for further examples to my own experience of them in youth, when they were comparatively frequent. They puzzled me then, but later they afforded me material to work on. I left Russia in 1920, and a couple of years later, when I was a student in Berlin, I began to suffer homesickness: to be exact I was visited by it. But there was no longer any home in Russia: my father had died of typhus and the rest of the family had left the country.
I had known homesickness as a child. I remember it coming over me at twilight when I was staying with an aunt. The house was very quiet. I felt that I was in a mist – she never lit the lamps until it was quite dark – the sunlit hours had vanished as if they had never existed, and the now felt endless in memory. I pined for home, as if stretching out towards it.
My new homesickness, in Berlin, did not resemble the old one in the least: it did not come at twilight, or at any definite time; I did not pine: on the contrary it was as if something came to me, bringing a sense of mystery, magic, and loss. For years I did not know how to describe this kind of homesickness.
The next thing I noticed (there seems an infinity of time between the two observations, as there must seem to the baby between rolling over and crawling) was that my homesickness did not come when I might well have expected it: sitting with Russians round the samovar, reminiscing nostalgically about lilac and syringa, school outings in May and wild strawberries and cream, teachers of literature and essays on Turgenev’s women, or moved to tears by a line in a Russian song. Such purposeful journeys in chosen company were not at all like my unpredictable, sudden homesickness, my feelings of something precious in the past, reassuring by its mere existence, a fleeting joy, not to be held even for a moment in the mind. It was then that I used to say, being still in my early twenties, that I would give ten years of my life to revisit Russia. In time it dawned on me that some of the Russian émigrés I met, whose childhood had been a paradise, did not seem to know my kind of homesickness. So why did I, whose childhood had been full of darkness as well as light, have these intimations of a paradise lost? …
To sum up my experiences of involuntary memories in Berlin: they always came suddenly, they brought me great joy, and more often than not I lived in the ‘then’ and forgot the ‘now’. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, where Proust described his real experience of involuntary memories, he says that it happens that we come upon an object and a lost sensation thrills in us, but we cannot give it a name. Still more elusive was an element of fear and it was years before I found this confirmed in Proust’s experiences recorded in Jean Santeuil.
So elusive are these experiences of involuntary memories that Aksakov goes so far as to say that when involuntary memories came back to him in childhood the moment was ‘imperceptible to consciousness’.
Often one notices nothing more than a change of mood. If I had not been the kind of person who is drawn to his memories like a musical person to sounds, and had not re-created many of them in words, nothing more than fragments would have been left of my experience of involuntary memories in youth. One thing I remember clearly: saying to myself that they helped me to live; yes, they sustained me and gave me courage, which I needed in the utter insecurity in which I, like so many émigrés and refugees, found myself.
It was years before I realised that my homesickness in Berlin had been for the past, that people who have never left their country have similar experiences: we are all exiles from our past. It was then that I was surprised, indeed amazed, that my involuntary memories in Berlin had not reminded me of similar experiences which I had had before I left home: memories of a pale blue figured-velvet outfit, a little yellow magic stick, colours changing in the neck of a drake, for these and other fragments had brought me indescribable joys when I was still a schoolgirl.
Looking back I can see now what made confusion worse confounded. As well as being unpredictable, elusive, and desultory, my involuntary memories did not always bring me joy: some brought only great distress. Some had the glory and freshness of a dream, but others were nightmares. I had a memory of my sister who died before she was four of diphtheria. I was nine years old, the eldest, and she the fourth. I had memories of her, playing with Father, unafraid of him, and delighting me as she did him. But the memory of her dying, which came back to me while I was still a child suddenly and unexpectedly, did something terrible to me. I am standing in the doorway, she is lying on her back on the bed, and her face in agony is in a pool of morning sunlight coming from the window opposite. My father on one side, my mother on the other, are desperately trying to help her. Death was not new to me: my grandfather died in our house not many months earlier, neighbours’ children had died. I cannot separate the components in my unmitigated horror when this memory suddenly hit me, and I know for certain it happened more than once, but I do remember trying to shake off the memory as one tries to wake from a nightmare.
No, not all involuntary memories bring joy. Aksakov went to boarding-school at nine. His mother had made the need of his going clear to him – they could not afford a tutor. He would have managed the separation from her, and the teasing of other children, but for the headmaster’s dislike of him: ‘I don’t like your silent, solitary child,’ he told the master who was kind to the boy. Aksakov began to break down – he describes his illness fully in A Russian Schoolboy. Suddenly there would come back to him memory of his home, Aksakovo. One day, when he was preparing a lesson, a pigeon suddenly perched on the windowsill and began to turn around and coo – at once he was reminded of his pet pigeon at home, and immediately his chest constricted and he had a fainting fit. This happened again and again. At the time nobody could discover the cause of these attacks, but Aksakov is convinced that every one of these fits was due to a sudden memory of the past appearing to him with the ‘vividness and brightness of a dream’. This might happen when he was thinking of something quite different, or learning a lesson: ‘suddenly the sound of a voice, probably resembling a voice I had heard before; a patch of sunlight on the window or wall, such as had before lit up familiar objects; or a fly buzzing and beating against a window pane, which I had often watched in my childhood – suddenly and for one instant, though imperceptible to consciousness, evoked the forgotten past and gave a shock to my overstrung nerves’. He got worse, and his mother came and fetched him away.
From ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities (1972), translated by William Weaver (1975)
Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
From CHARLES RYCROFT, The Innocence of Dreams (1991)
Since the physiological evidence suggests that we all dream for about a fifth of the time that we are asleep, the majority of dreams dreamt must be forgotten. Indeed, since some people claim never to dream, it must be possible for people to forget all their dreams. On the face of it, therefore, the fact that some dreams are remembered and others are forgotten, and that some people remember dreams frequently, some people remember dreams seldom, and yet others remember them never, constitutes a problem.
Curiously enough, this problem is almost always raised in connection with forgetting dreams, the tacit assumption being that dreams are experiences analogous to events or happenings, that events are normally remembered, and that it must therefore require some special explanation to account for forgetting dream events. On this view of the matter, forgetting dreams is as remarkable as, and is the same kind of phenomenon as, forgetting the whole of one’s childhood, losing one’s memory, or forgetting about things that are of importance in one’s everyday life – all of which are instances of forgetting that are, in principle, pathological, since they impoverish one’s sense of self and interfere with one’s capacity to function efficiently; there is obviously something amiss if one has forgotten one’s origins, if one has lost one’s memory and no longer knows who one is, or if one fails to remember things that one has to do or facts that have a bearing on one’s life. So, if dreams really were events, forgetting them would be a form of amnesia, a forgetting of what in health would be remembered, and is due to some conflict, inhibition or repression which prevents the emergence into consciousness of wishes, thoughts and recollections that would disturb the dreamer’s waking equanimity and received conception of himself.
Now, although the forgetting of many dreams must be explicable in this way – just as many instances of forgetting things in waking life are patently due to the wish to forget them, e.g. forgetting to pay bills, to keep dreaded appointments, forgetting the names of people one dislikes, or wishes to snub, or who remind one of events of which one is ashamed – consideration of the nature and function of memory and of the quantitative relationship existing between the past and the presentfn7 will show that it cannot possibly be true that in a state of ideal health people would be able to remember every thought and image of which they have ever been conscious, whether in their sleep or while awake, – and that the assumption that they could is an example of misapplying ideas derived from pathology.
According to biological and neurological theory, the function of memory is to enable each organism or individual to base his actions on a wider range of experience than would be available to him if he had no memory; to enable him to interpret the present in terms of past experience and to make decisions which take account of the past as well as of the immediate present. And an efficient memory is one which makes available to its owner information relevant to his present and future without distracting him by irrelevancies. In other words, when memory is functioning harmoniously, information (memories) relevant to work will be available when working, information relevant to home will be available at home, information relevant to childhood will be available when in the company of children, information relevant to food will be available when hungry, and so on – and information which would be distracting will be unavailable.
It follows from this that memory is not, as it were, an inbuilt audio-visual tape of one’s past thoughts and experiences, all parts of which should ideally be instantly available, but a selective process by which the present self is continuously fed with relevant memories from its past and protected from distraction and confusion by some barrier to remembering the irrelevant. It follows from this too that there are three categories of past experience that can loosely be described as forgotten: those which will never have any bearing on the present and never are or need be retrieved, e.g. half-formed thoughts which never crystallise out into a definite idea or decision, or the intermediate stages of a calculation the final result of which may be retrievable; those which remain dormant or latent because situations on which they might have bearing are not being presently encountered, e.g. a language once learnt but not at present being used; and those which do have bearing on the present but are rendered unavailable by conflict, inhibition and repression, e.g. memories of childhood events which have a bearing on aspects of the self with which the present self is not in contact, and, more dramatically, fugue states (loss of memory) in which the individual forgets who he is.
From TERRY PRATCHETT, Reaper Man (1991)
The sun was near the horizon.
The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.
‘You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,’ said one of them.
‘You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.’
‘It were higher, too.’
‘It was. You’re right.’
‘And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect.’
‘They did. They did,’ said the other mayfly vehemently.
‘I reckon, if mayflies these hours behaved a bit better, we’d still be having proper sun.’
The younger mayflies listened politely.
‘I remember,’ said one of the oldest mayflies, ‘when all this was fields, as far as you could see.’
The younger mayflies looked around.
‘It’s still fields,’ one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
‘I remember when it was better fields,’ said the old mayfly sharply.
‘Yeah,’ said his colleague. ‘And there was a cow.’
‘That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow! Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty minutes. It was brown, as I recall.’
‘You don’t get cows like that these hours.’
‘You don’t get cows at all.’
‘What’s a cow?’ said one of the hatchlings.
‘See?’ said the oldest mayfly triumphantly. ‘That’s modern Ephemeroptera for you.’ It paused. ‘What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?’
‘Zigzagging aimlessly over the water,’ said one of the young flies. This was a fair bet in any case.
‘No, before that.’
‘Er … you were telling us about the Great Trout.’
‘Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly –’
‘– taking heed of your elders and betters –’
‘– yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Trout –’
Clop
Clop
‘Yes?’ said one of the younger mayflies.
There was no reply.
‘The Great Trout what?’ said another mayfly, nervously.
They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.
‘The holy sign!’ said a mayfly. ‘I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!’
The oldest of the young mayflies watched the water thoughtfully. It was beginning to realise that, as the most senior fly present, it now had the privilege of hovering closest to the surface.
‘They say,’ said the mayfly at the top of the zigzagging crowd, ‘that when the Great Trout comes for you, you go to a land flowing with … flowing with …’ Mayflies don’t eat. It was at a loss. ‘Flowing with water,’ it finished lamely.
‘I wonder,’ said the oldest mayfly.
‘It must be really good there,’ said the youngest.
‘Oh? Why?’
‘’Cos no one ever wants to come back.’
From MARTIN AMIS, Experience (2000)
This is strenuous moonshine. He wasn’t coming back. Words and memories were leaving him: like banks of lights and switches, sighing as they closed down.
– I feel a bit … You know.
– What Dad?
– You know.
– Anxious? Uneasy?
– Not really. Just a bit … You know.
I know? In his choice of words my father is not a delegator, particularly in accounts of his own state of mind. But here he is, smiling trustingly and, it seems, calmly, and lost for words. I now see that this was an alternate-world Kingsley, an anti-Kingsley, confined from now on to a regime of tautologies and commonplaces. What his brain was doing was the opposite of writing … his hands today are all over the place, waving, interclasping, and again waving. Should I regale him with his description of the critic and writer John Berger?
‘All this with my hands, it’s nothing sinister.’
I am impressed by the rare and immediate success with the adjective (‘Or is that a complement, Dad?’ I once asked him. ‘Yes but it’s first-and-foremost an adjective,’ he said, momentarily enraged by a competing pedantry.)
