I read a book recently by a war correspondent, a woman, who had covered wars from the Spanish Civil to the Bosnian (the most recent Bosnian, not one of the innumerable ones prior to the most recent). It was not a book of her wartime experiences; rather, she had five essays of travels which all, in their way, had been for pleasure but which all, in their way, were less than pleasurable. She explained in the introduction that she wrote somewhat at the insistence of her editor and the demands of her finances, but also, she wrote because of what she termed her incredibly poor memory. All of the works had been written more or less when the travel had occurred – either as essays themselves or as collections of notes – but she remarked that memory was something that was always lost on her. The future, in her eyes, presented an infinite and surprising potential source of memories, which made her own past – closed as it was to new experience and limited by what her life had offered to her – seem unimportant to remember.
A good friend of mine has a mother who may soon enter hospice care. The mother’s body is slowly deteriorating, organically deteriorating, and she can no longer live on her own. More troubling, though, is the fact that her brain can’t easily control her body any more, including now preventing her from being able to speak. My friend can see the spark of life, the fire of memory and wit and intelligence in her mother’s eyes, but can’t get expression out of her anymore save the occasional yes or no or grunt. Her mother’s memories are trapped except for the light that is revealed in her eyes.
I had almost finished another piece for the website – which I’ll post concurrently to this one – about rest stops, part of it about the rest stops in the American prairies and another a reverie where I recalled visiting a particular rest stop in Italy with my father about fifteen years ago. I had written about it as it came to me, but after I finished it and read it over, I realized something disturbing: I had invented a part of the memory, where we ordered a delicious ham sandwich. When I read the story over again, my memory said, sharply, “that never happened – or more precisely, it didn’t happen at that rest stop.”
I spent a few hours in the dark (my son was asleep in my tiny studio apartment which is now my remaining bit of Seattle existence) pondering this, from two different perspectives. First, what had made me write the story in the first place including the spurious ham sandwich episode? When I write I tend to just write – that is, write in a kind of stream of consciousness but not really true stream of consciousness; my consciousness doesn’t range Dali-like across a melting landscape but is more of the Isambard Brunel variety, carving gentle but purposeful curves across the land. In that regard, once I start an essay, I complete it first, and then go back and edit it, not so much for content but for grammar and style (and I thank all of you for bearing up with my often lousy grammar and inconsistent style). But after this ham sandwich incident, I’m wondering where that consciousness takes me, and I wonder just how solid my memory landscape is. Perhaps there is more Dali there than I suspected?
The other angle that came to me was a feeling that the ham sandwich episode was real, but that my memory had misplaced it in the context of driving with my father in a fat long wide Mercedes in 2003. I know that ham sandwich; I can see the long roll, less than a baguette but more than just a roll, a kind they really only have in Italy. It’s dusty with bread and crusty on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and there is a smear of olive oil on both sides. The ham – well, calling it “ham” seems rude. It’s not the milky pink color of American or French ham, and it’s more intense even than Prosciutto. It was more like a belota ham from Spain – but this sandwich was from Italy.
I wracked my brain trying to think of where this sandwich erupted into my sensory and mental memory banks, which was not unpleasant except for the fact that the apartment was pretty bare of snacks and I couldn’t head out to grab any food as my son was asleep. I thought of sandwiches in Majorca with my ex-wife – she found a bar which had spectacular local brown bread, smeared with garlic and olive oil and tomato, slabs of dark red local ham and big caper berries on top with slices of fresh tomato. I thought of ham sandwiches in train stations in Rome and Milan, far tastier than transit food had a right to be but not quite the memory in my head. I thought about sandwiches in general.
Finally I remembered sitting in the Rome airport, heading back from visiting the ex-wife while she was studying in Rome, ordering a beer and a ham sandwich on a plastic cafeteria tray. The sandwich was one of many sitting under a light in a cooling tray, and looked kind of tired behind the glass. But once on the slightly-too-small paper plate, sitting on top of the much-too-small napkin, it looked lovely. And it tasted delicious, like a revelation.
It was 2 am by the time I finally remembered where the sandwich came from, and I felt the kind of relief you feel when, several hours earlier during a dinner party, you bring up an anecdote but can’t for the life of you remember where it happened or who the central person in the anecdote was, and your mind can’t turn off until it grabs hold of the memory. This was an anecdote I was, essentially, telling myself, but the need to resolve the wrong memory was no less strong. This time, though, having figured out the source, I was left with the problem of that first perspective: namely, why, brain, did you invent a story that had no need of a ham sandwich episode – why did you invent a fiction when simply recalling the non-fiction was enough?
I’m not going to excuse myself and say “that’s just storytelling – what really happened isn’t as important as the woof and warp of the entirety of the Story”. I’m not trying to write fiction here; I’m trying to talk about the world as I experience it – which I understand isn’t totally the world-as-it-is because I can never embrace the totality of the world-as-it-is, but I can still focus and be true to my actual experience, not my hoped-for or imagined or simply fabricated “experience”.
There have been times where I’ve told stories – usually in groups of people after work over drinks, or at tiresome dinner parties where I’m holding up more of the conversation than I’d usually wish to – that are, not fabrications, but amalgams of disparate episodes that are much more interesting (to my ear) when glommed together into a single event. The setting is important there; you can’t spend time on explication or scene-setting for separate events without being a bore, and usually, the conversation is boring enough. Over time I’ve built a few of these not quite fictional but never happened in the sequence described stories, and I use them as stock for flagging events where hopefully no one has heard them before – and if they have, I’ll give a knowing wink to indicate that yeah, I know this isn’t quite the same as the first time you heard about this, but roll with me, okay?
But that’s not this website. What has also happened before is that I’ve told stories that I’m convinced did, in fact, occur, but I’m then reminded – usually by my mom – that it didn’t happen that way at all, that here’s how it really happened. This always stuns me; I usually deny that I got it wrong (mom can attest to that) but she plants a seed of doubt in me that results in me not telling that story so often again. And when I do, I usually try to retell it with my mom (or whoever pointed out its dubiousness) present – maybe the next time I’ll get it right, or the way I’ll tell it the next time will spark something in their memory that says oh right, that did happen, I just remembered it differently.
Over the past couple of years I’ve had the opportunity to mine my own memory for accuracy and for perspective. My ex and I have spent countless hours in therapy trying to bring some sense of meaning and purpose to what ended up as a failed marriage and what is becoming a successful exercise in raising a child – and examining our individual and shared memory, our utterly private and unreconcilable versions of a shared history, has been a huge part of the therapy process. The ex-girlfriend shares my overwillingness to examine actions and minutely recount conversations and events, and every time she’s done so I’m confronted with my brain’s ability – almost its desire – to mix conversations, mix events, mix emotional history with intellectual facts.
It’s trite to call memory unreliable. What’s interesting is that we have no choice but to rely upon it. We use memory in the way the people who build search algorithms and quant stock picking programs use held-back pieces of data time series to test the algorithms for predictive power – but in those cases, they’re holding back information which is objective and which represents time series which really occurred. Our memories are jumbled, colorful, but false – and yet we still use them to backtest our theories about how our worlds work and our hypotheses of how we should act within them.
So to be clear: when you read the essay, “Remembrance of Rest Stops Past”, keep in mind that the ham sandwich did not actually feature in that particular drive or at that particular rest stop. The rest is clear as day, and nothing within my mind tells me that it didn’t happen. I remember – clear as the day on which my father and I were driving – coming up the long ascent, seeing the sign for a rest stop, pulling off to the right as the road itself swept dramatically on the inside corner of a steep cliff, the rest stop being lit brilliantly by sun carving through the mountains and onto the pavement and the long, smoky-glass dark cafe and service station building, with petrol pumps out front and a smattering of cars in the back. I remember the espresso – which was delicious – and I remember the banks of liquor bottles. I remember the desultory store with its inventory of Italian porno and kitchen supplies. I remember the red neon sign.
And it’s entirely possible that none of it happened that way. But my memory told me the ham sandwiches definitely didn’t happen, not “there” at a dodgy rest stop above Turin in 2003 anyway (more like 2006 and at a dodgy airport cafe). With hand on heart, though, I’ve searched my soul, and I’m pretty sure the rest of it did happen the way I remember.
So I have a new appreciation for my friend’s mom, and why maybe I would also keep a certain gleam of wit and expression in my eye even if I couldn’t talk about my memories anymore, because I’m aware now that my tiresome recollections might not even be real, even if they bring me joy to “recall” them. And I’m also far more appreciative of the view that memories are good, but what we should really relish is the future and its factory of infinitely more, and infinitely different, experiences, far more than we could ever store as our histories in our minds.
But take it all with a grain of salt.
Madness Visible?