I am a Faint and Forgetful Loop?
One thing his discussion made me think about is how really awful my memory is. I’m not talking about forgetting my own telephone number, although I do that often enough; I’m talking about an inability to remember experiences and anecdotes about the majority of my childhood. Of my early years I remember almost nothing — I have a few “snapshots” of Anchorage, Alaska and Rolla, Missouri — things like being bullied by some neighborhood boys in Anchorage and enjoying a quiet, sunny moment counting buttons from a tin in my mother’s attic art room in Rolla — but my really coherent memories, especially of people besides my mother and father, don’t begin until around Warrensburg, Missouri. I don’t know how old I would have been then. I think we lived in Warrensburg during the Bicentennial, though, so, 10? Which means my episodic memories don’t really begin until sometime around then; maybe a year or two earlier. I don’t have clear time-references or grade-references attached to those memories that would help me say, “this memory occurred before that one.”
I don’t know why my memories are so poor. But I know it’s unusual, because other people seem to be able to remember much more about their childhoods than I can.
I have the same problem, perhaps to a lesser extent, with more recent events. I recently viewed some slides with my father and saw some of the NATO base in Italy. I recognized it with a sense of wonder: “I was there. I’d forgotten what it looked like entirely.” Even now I can still only dredge up a few impressions of it; or, indeed, of much of my time in Italy. Members of my gaming group can remember adventures we played in college more clearly than I can — even adventures I ran. Sometimes I remember them when I’m reminded, but once in a while, only in the vaguest sense: “Oh, yeah, I ran that, didn’t we?”
I wonder, is the fact that I moved around so regularly as a child the reason why so much of my childhood has been forgotten? Because when you move regularly, you don’t have anyone but family members to re-tell and reminisce with, to keep your memories “alive” or at least active. The activities you may have shared with friends eventually fade, because those friends, and even the places where the activities took place, are no longer part of your life. My family was never one to construct photo albums or keep family photos on the wall, either, so there weren’t many visual reminders of my past to stimulate my memory. It wasn’t until college that I met non-familial individuals with whom I was still interacting five years later or more. But now I’m back where I was before, surrounded by casual acquaintances because all of the people whom I like enough, and know well enough, to call my friends now live elsewhere. I do have some members of my family around, true, but I usually only see them once a month or less. How much of all this will I forget?
If I take Hofstadter’s concepts to heart, I can only think that my comparative paucity of childhood memories and my recent lack of close interaction with friends has restricted the development of what he would call my soul; or that we might at least call my sense of I. That’s not intended to be a self-pitying statement; just a reflection about myself in the context of his hypothesis. As I said, I’m letting his concepts bounce around my brain a little, to see where they end up landing.
Also, you’d think it’s very strange for a writer to have a bad memory.
drupagliassotti @ May 16, 2007