Adieu, Adieu! Hamlet, Remember me!
- Ghost of Denmark
The psychiatrist Barry Reisberg first observed twenty years ago (that) the decline of an Alzheimer’s patient mirrors in reverse the neurological development of a child. The earliest capacities a child develops – raising the head (at one to three months), smiling (two to four months), sitting up unassisted (six to ten months) – are the last capacities an Alzheimer’s patient loses. Brain development in a growing child is consolidated through a process called myelinization, wherein the axonal connections among neurons are gradually strengthened by sheathings of the fatty substance myelin. Apparently, since the last regions of the child’s brain to mature remain the least myelinated, they’re the regions most vulnerable to the insult of Alzheimer’s. The hippocampus, which processes short-term memories into long-term, is very slow to myelinize. This is why we’re unable to form permanent episodic memories before the age of three or four, and why the hippocampus is where the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s first appear. Hence the ghostly apparition of the middle-stage patient who continues to be able to walk and feed herself even as she remembers nothing from hour to hour. The inner child isn’t inner anymore. Neurologically speaking, we’re looking at a one-year-old.
- from How to be Alone, Essays by Jonathan Franzen.
I’ve never been particularly good with my memory of external events. I think this shows in my dreams – I am not so attached to the external form of things as attached to my internal emotional state when large events happen to me. Of course, like everyone else, my memory is a weird pastiche of things which I remember first hand, embellished by stories narrated by my mother, (less but sometimes) my father, my aunt, my friends. And I am always stunned when an account of an event from another source clashes completely with my own – this has happened a few times, and I’ve always felt a kind of serious cognitive dissonance whenever it happens. I am so certain that my version must be right, and theirs wrong – fortunately for me, I have been addicted to writing ever since I discovered how, and so at least I have a logbook, as such, of events to “prove” that events really happened to me the way that they did, at least from inside my head. I am so thankful for the technology of writing – so, so thankful – because I can easily converse with my 10 year-old-self, my 14-year-old-self, even my 7-year-old self. And as I write this now, I write for my 30-year-old self, my 40-year-old-self, even my 80-year-old-self – I am in continuous conversation with myself. There are certain selves I really dislike, my 14-year-old self being one of them. I’ve been trying to learn compassion for those people, seeing as they were actually me. But it always startles me to realize that all this – all this, which seems to appear so solid, like a cinematic reel that I assume I could hold in my hands – is really a sort of cognitive phantom, a genie we unbottle to toy with for a while, which we cannot be certain we will ever be able to retrieve.
Franzen reminded me of the stuff I learned in my introductory psychology class – that memories are merely temporary constellations (the graphic in my textbook actually showed little red stars being united by red lines across the hemispheres of the brain), reinforced each time we conjure them, but subtly altered each time also by our brain chemistry at that moment on that day. Nothing is pure, nothing is original. Everything, like film itself – is burned away even as we watch it. There is no such thing as perfect archiving, perfect recall. All that is an illusion in the first place.
I understand the inherent hysteria that the inner historian in us feels when told something like this. But on the other hand, I wonder why we fear forgetting so much. Sometimes I fear remembering too much. It is blessed to forget – it makes it easier to forgive. The repressed memories of evil (which Freud inadvisedly, at times, dredged up) can surely be as harmful as the forgotten good ones. We see this phenomenon in history – we refuse to look at the dark periods of our own people, preferring to narrate a story of triumph and entitlement. In Australia there is an odd phenomenon of “black armband history” in which most of the history is narrated negatively, and the revisionists, instead of springing the occasional expose on the crimes of ancestors, try valiantly to paint a better picture of the nation (the ones who were not convicts, racists, jailers, etc.), only to be stomped upon by the liberals who yell that the wrongs are not yet redressed, so it’s premature to celebrate.
image from Wikipedia
I don’t know if this is right or wrong. But I do know that Britain has a curious preference to narrate itself as an underdog, even though it was a vast empire. And that Israel has the most hangdog national history of any people I can think of. America is very much triumphalist – hubristic, even, in its desire to be a nation before God, blameless and upright. France narrates itself as Reasonable, when in fact it swung from one kind of tyranny to another all the way until Napoleon imploded the empire. I think in any case it is best to, if one really wants to “know thyself”, as the apocryphal Greek sage(s) say, it is wise to go back and stare at the things you remember but wish you did not – the dark (or the light) side which was neglected when you started to narrate yourself wholly – to disillusion yourself to the things which you wish you had not done, to stare that beast in the eye and to understand it, and unite it with the godlike being who also dwells in the same breast. And then perhaps we can call ourselves Homo Sapiens – Man – “Knowing Man”, Wise Woman, Wise Man.
