Memory and meaning

I have been thinking a lot about memory and meaning; it all started when I ordered this book Christina blogged about. As often happens when I’m on the trail of something, clues appear everywhere and I find myself now with a small notebook filling up with quotes about memory, food for thought. I’m currently chewing on something I read in The Shadow of the Wind: “Few things are more deceptive than memory.” If our own memories are not to be trusted – and I think all of us have some experience in remembering in perfect detail something our partner, brother, or grandmother remembers quite differently – and third-hand information, about others or ourselves, is suspect, (“ ‘But that means we can’t be sure of anything. Everything we know is, as you say, third- or even fourth-hand,’” says a character in The Shadow of the Wind) how do we tell the story of our lives? Even those of us who journal obsessively and perhaps think we have an advantage in reconstructing the past might be surprised: I’ve been keeping journals since I was ten years old, and sometimes they are illuminating and sometimes they are remarkably useless.

For years I’ve known that my brother and I led different lives even while sitting in the same room, even while taking the same vacations. He remembers meals I swear I’ve never eaten, hotels I swear I’ve never stayed at, condos I swear I haven’t seen. He played games with me that I have no knowledge of. For example, my family used to rent a cabin at Henry’s Lake in Idaho. Across a field from the cabins stood an old abandoned barn where my brother and I used to play. To reach the barn we’d walk to the end of the gravel road and then cut across the field in which cattle sometimes grazed. I remember the barn. I remember the field. I remember the cattle. I remember being afraid of them and staying close to the stray black dog that shadowed us everywhere that summer. I remember how once we reached the barn we fashioned a ramp to the hay loft with a long wooden plank and I remember how the plank bowed beneath my weight as I hurried across the mid-way point. I remember how the dog followed us up into the loft, her claws splayed, her belly low as she inched up that plank, her inexplicable loyalty to us conquering her certainty that she was doing what no dog ought to do. I remember the cool shaded space of the hay loft, the speckled sunlight, the dust motes.

I do not remember jumping the twelve feet back to the ground, which is what my brother says we did over and over again.

He is sure that we did this. I have no memory of it at all but in the face of his memory I am unwilling to say that I wasn’t there, or that I just watched as he jumped. In the face of my blank slate I accept his version of the story, slotting one of his memories into my life story. But if I don’t remember jumping, does it matter if I did? Patricia Hampl writes that “we store in memory only images of value.” What then am I to make of all the things I don’t remember but have been told happened? Do I care? Are they part of my life story at all? What if my brother is wrong? What, aside from claiming the memory, makes him a more reliable witness than me and my lack of memory? It must mean something that I don’t remember it; I have to believe that there is a qualitative difference between memories we formed as children and information about ourselves we obtained second- or third-hand.

If Hampl is right, if we store images only of value, then our memories, our genuine personal memories, tell the true story of our lives – not merely what happened to us, but what formed us. What we valued. What we chose. Just as the holes in our memory might tell us a great deal about ourselves as well: what we chose to discard. Out of the forest of memory, this tree stands out because it meant something to me and that tree recedes into the background because it didn’t.

I remember the barn. I remember the loft. I remember the dog and her mysterious devotion to us. I don’t remember jumping. Twelve feet as a seven year old, you’d think I’d remember the fear I must have felt, or the exhilaration, if nothing else. But I don’t. I do however have a perfect image, as perfect as a photograph, of my mother giving that dog a pork chop bone on the front porch of our vacation cabin. I don’t remember jumping out of that loft, but I remember that small moment.

So did I jump? And if I did, which event holds more meaning, the jumping or the forgetting?

(The forgetting, of course.)