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Thanks for the Memory

©2002 David Boyne

What is memory?

I think that memory is an art.

Memory, like all artistic expression, is rooted in reality, in our sensual perception of reality, and our rational interpretation of reality, but has little, if anything, to do with exactly, literally, recording or transcribing reality.

What is history?

I think that history is an art, too. When I've told people how I consider history to be an art, and historians to be artists, they have been very upset with me. They try to convert me to their belief that memory is a recording of reality, and that history is a record of what actually happened.

I change the subject. "So how 'bout them Yankees?"

What is time?

I've heard it said that Nature created time to keep everything from happening at once. I like that. And I will add this: Nature created memory to keep everything from happening only once.

Because memory is time travel.

Practicing the art of Memory is time travel for one—think of it as backpacking through time.

Practicing the art of History is time travel for escorted groups—think of it as taking a chartered bus tour through time.

I could be wrong, but I believe every human being, and indeed, every life form on this planet, practices the art of memory in a way that is as unique as their very being.

My memory, when it comes to accuracy, is totally unreliable. In the past, when in relationships with people who had memories as accurate as the transcript of a court proceeding, I was always found guilty. They were no doubt right in their judgement of me, but my point is that I was incompetent to be on trial in the first place, as I could not participate in my own defense.

I can’t remember words to save my life or recite a sonnet. I can't remember numbers, especially numbers used to denote money. I cannot remember the simplest sequence of events, even enough to fill out a traffic accident report.

I can, however, remember sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches—but again, none of them accurately.

I can tell you what the sky and the light were like the first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge fifteen years ago, but I can’t tell you, accurately, from memory, what I may have said two minutes ago. In the very moment when I am creating a memory, I am changing it, altering it.

Given my fractured mosaic of memory, it amuses me no end that what I am about to assert, I do firmly believe: memory is the central mechanism of evolution—for an individual, a nation, a species.

Consider B. F. Skinner's rats. Skinner put some rats in cages and conditioned them to expect a pellet of food to be dropped into their cage every time they pressed on a lever. Ho-hum.

Then Skinner changed the world—at least, he changed the world of those caged rats. Skinner wanted to see what happened if he made the pellet of food drop into the rat's cage only every fifth time they pressed the lever. Whoa! Hysteria. Frantic pressing of the lever in desperate effort to regain the expected, somehow lost, food pellets.

Yet, over time, the rats became re-conditioned. New memory asserted itself, and they learned to expect the food to drop into their cage after the fifth pressing of the lever. Back to ho-hum.

Then Skinner played god, yet again. He had the manna-like pellets of food drop into the cages without rhyme or reason or rhythm—not related to the number or frequency of lever pressings. The rats, unable to determine a pattern, pressed the lever unrelentingly. Despite randomly receiving an occasional pellet of food, the rats were so consumed by the "memory" of the pellets of food that they should have been receiving but were not receiving, that they would not stop pressing the lever, would not stop trying to make the lost pellets come back.

With these experiments in intermittent reinforcement, Skinner discovered what the gambling industry had known since the dawn of history: If we win only rarely, it drives us nuts and we can’t stop trying because we never know when we will win, or if we will ever win again, and we suspect those pellets of food are going somewhere and why the hell aren't they coming to us when we're just as deserving if not more so than the slob slamming the lever on the machine next to us?

"Just one more try! I know the pellet will drop on the next try! 78,543 has always been my lucky number!"

What all of that has to do with memory being the center-spring of evolution, I've no idea. I've forgotten the point I was trying to make. No great loss.

Ah, loss. Why is the memory of what we have lost more powerful than the memory of what we possess?

We have the ability to travel through time, by memory and by history, and the most popular destinations we journey to are the people and places and things that we have lost.

There are only two ways to remember what we once had, and lost.

One way to remember a loss is with anger.

This is called a grudge. A grudge is complex. It has five parts. First, you must remember something that you have lost. Second, you must be pissed off about the loss. Third, you must choose to remain pissed off about the loss, perhaps for as long as you are alive. Fourth, you must blame someone for your loss. Fifth, you must want to make that someone suffer as much as you are suffering from holding on to your grudge.

While grudges all begin in memory, if they are accepted by a group they can travel beyond the limits of one lifetime and become history.

Imagine holding onto anger over a loss, holding on to it for your entire life. Then imagine passing that anger over a loss on to your children. Then imagine your children passing that anger over a loss on to their children, and on, and on.

If you can't imagine this, there's an easier way to see the effects of holding a grudge: read a newspaper. For little grudges, read the local news. For big grudges, read the national news. For historical grudges, read the international news.

Holding a grudge is one of the stupidest of the many stupid human tricks. My dog is incapable of holding a grudge. I think David Letterman should have people on his show who are holding grudges so all the pets in America can have a good laugh.

Where was I? Oh, yes: The other way to remember a loss is much easier: remember the loss in any way you care to, so long as you don't remember it with anger.

I prefer this method of remembering my losses. I can remember a loss on Monday with sorrow; on Tuesday, I can remember my loss with embarrassment. During the rest of the week I might remember my loss with regret, remorse, reason, ridicule, wisdom, humor, shame, denial or compassion. My usual memory of any particular loss is a complex and shifting mix of all the above. I like that my memories are always changing; they never bore me.

Okay. So if we use memory to revisit, to travel through time and gain a glancing experience of something that happened only once and is lost forever to us, then what is an actual memory?

I think a memory is the one truely private property that we can own.

A memory is exclusively ours. Yet we have not taken it from the common weal; we created it ourselves. Our memories are not like beach front land or reservoirs of oil— memories are not finite resources that we've claimed as our own, fenced off to exclude others, and erected legal systems to help us maintain control over. We just have them, hold them, and nothing is missing from anyone else's inventory.

We can share a memory, if we choose. But if we don't, no one will go hungry: everyone has his or her own memories.

Unlike sport utility vehicles and big-screen televisions, a really big memory requires no more raw materials from the planet than a really small memory. The size and potency of our memories is completely up to us, and how we choose to practice the art.

And a memory cannot be stolen, cannot be plagiarized, cannot be counterfeited. So far.

Yet any memory we possess we can also expand, upgrade, remodel, super-size, revise, edit, face-lift, lipo-suction, restock, repress, distort, or rotate in inventory...

I am the sum of my memories. You may steal my social security number and credit cards, but they aren't my identity.

Would I be, would I exist, if I had no memory?

Without my memories, only my body would be here. I would be gone.

Years ago, I heard Elie Weisel lecture at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He spoke about mankind needing to make a commitment to remembering. Listening to this man who has committed himself to remembering a holacaust of loss, and to remembering without anger, I saw how the art of memory could be any man’s supreme defiance—an incorruptible assertion of being and individuality.

In his speech, Elie Weisel asked his listeners to consider what might be the most horrifying disease known to mankind—

Was it cancer? AIDS? Hate?

He said it was Alzheimer’s disease.

Elie Weisel said that, with its destruction of all memory, its erasure of all individuality while the body lives on, Alzheimer’s disease is the worst disease imaginable.

Elie Weisel is right.