Childhood amnesia, storytelling, and the lifelong game of memory (part one)
It’s too easy, facile you might say, to open any piece with Joan Didion’s line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And much as I might like the line, the ring of it, the emotive force of it, I realize it cannot serve my purposes here. So, I wish to vary it a little to the following:
We tell ourselves stories in order to remember. We tell ourselves stories because we forget. We tell stories to fight the failures of memory. And when we fail to overcome failure, we tell more stories so that we might at least believe we remember.
Not long ago, I spent a week with a dear friend who is living with a severe memory disorder. As we walked around my small Devon town, she regularly told me she remembered this place or that, often adding a small account of some gathering or event at that location. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that she visited these locations years ago. I believe the events she remembered took place in some form and some (other) place. But the important point is that it made her feel better to tell me them, to insert herself into time and place, and to be seen as my equal in the game of memory we all play with variable accuracy and competence.
We are all vulnerable in that lifelong game of memory, and few rounds are more telling of that predicament than the ‘earliest memory’ round. “What is my earliest memory?” we like to ask ourselves.
This is a photo of me as a baby, together with my elder sister and brother. I don’t remember the moment of the photograph or any particular event relating to it, but I remember the sofa. More than that, I fix on the sofa – its pattern and texture – as an “earliest memory.” It is as though these left an imprint on my infant mind, settled somewhere behind my eyes and deposited traces on my fingertips so that I might always recall the sight and ‘feel’ of that old 1950s sofa.
But something is wrong here. A doubt, a sensation of unreliability to be explained tomorrow. While I put together that ‘something wrong’ and link it to a more generalized wrongness about memory, I leave you to think about your own ‘first memory’ and the question of its reliability. The degree of certainty or doubt you hold will have to do with the particularities of your chosen memory. But it is also to do with the amnesia that is written into the human condition from the start.
Part two will be published tomorrow.