memory, and forgetting V

"That was Macaulay," she said, "the historian. He just made it up after the event. The people gave it the other name years before they had any cause for weeping."

"Is that the Macaulay who wrote 'Horatio at the Bridge'?", I asked, trying hard to remember the poems of distant high school.

"Yes," she said. "The same one. He was one of those people who went through history picking and choosing and embellishing." She paused. "Still, I guess when you look at it now, one meaning can be true and the other can be accurate."

"Where did you say you come from?"

"Oh," I said, startled by the simplicity or complexity of the question. "From Cape Breton"

Cape Breton

[...]

"Perhaps that's why he became so interested in history," she went on. "He felt if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like a perfect building called the past. Perhaps he felt if he couldn't understand his immediate past, he would try and understand his distant past"

All of us are better when we're loved.

From No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod

Memory, and forgetting III

"I think I recall that", he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the thing's he's lost or displaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

I know these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. The arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.

I have no image of myself in relation with them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it's not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves.

From Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood.

Narrative IV

"Chronology means the child is always narrated from a third-person perspective ['Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid'], before it gains the ability to influence its own narration. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false narrations of others, of our story-telling parents. But the struggle against narration continues beyond childhood. A propaganda war surrounds the decision of who we are, a number of interest groups struggling to assert their view of reality, to have their story heard. "

[...]

"We [...] proceed by abbreviation, we take the dominant feature [of a tree, of an emotional state] and label as a whole something that is only a part. Similarly, the story we tell of an event remains a segment of the totality the moment comprised; as soon as the moment is narrated, it loses its multiplicity and ambivalence in the name of abstracted meaning and authorial intent. The story embodies the poverty of the remembered event. [...] Pressed for time and eager to simplify, we are forced to narrate and remember things by ellipsis, or we would be overwhelmed both by our ambivalence and our instability. The present becomes degraded first into history, then into nostalgia."

From Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

Memory, and forgetting II

"I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don’t notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is."

From True Stories (1986)

Memory, and forgetting I

"We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

Geoffrey Sonnabend - Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter.
Here is an overview by Valentine Worth

Emily has become inscrutable...

Swum away.





A momentary muse taught me not all was lies; and the power of truth.

---

Disappearing in all directions

memory

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The metaphysicians and notable reasoners about the nice matters of identity, affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. And what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more? and thus let me lose self every hour, and be twenty successive selfs, or new selfs, ’tis all one to me: so I lose not my opinion. If I carry that with me ’tis I; all is well.

Philosophical Regimen - Earl of Shaftesbury

"There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come amongst those who shall come after"

Ecclesiastes