Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life (Section III)

Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life:
The Gift and Curse of Mnemosyne and Lethe

Section III – Perspectives from the Humanities

The pasts we carry but do not entirely cognize regularly 
rise to colonize our present. But once we admit the ways–whether subtle and subterranean, or entirely overt–by which this eerie domination of now by then can happen, then memory turns labyrinthine.
—Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis

I propose instead to read Ulysses as an “odyssey” of memory or an “odyssey” through memory, a novel in which characters 
and readers struggle to come to terms with the past in order to move toward the resolution of the desire for closure – for Ithaca.
—John S. Rickard, Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnics of Ulysses

            In the previous blog, I briefly examined selected biomedical perspectives on memory and forgetting in the aging domain. The breadth and depth of the research in the domain of aging and memory issues is astounding – and overwhelming – which is ironic given our topic: what is worth remembering (including) and what do we simply let go (excluding) in all of that research? This is important because – the aging mind – is both a personal (and individual) and a public health issue. It is public health issue due to the sheer impact of the demographic transition that will occur in the next two decades. For example, on Dec. 2, 2008, The Wall Street Journal carried a great article by Robert Hotz (p. A14)  and it was reported that with 78 million baby boomers turning 60 at the rate of 8,000 a day (in the US) and with the fact that by 2050, the world’s population of those over 60 years old is expected to exceed the number of young people for the first time in history, there is the estimate that more than 2 billion people will be potentially prone to memory lapse and “befuddlement” (I don’t like the word – and I can’t remember the last time I used it…trying to think of something else – ah, there was the movie “The Fog of War” – maybe there will be a “The Fog of Aging” ?).

Okay – so what was my point? – That I do remember…All that research on this topic…So now what?

Is the answer in taking a cocktail of select biochemicals to offset the aging mind? How about playing video games (Nintendo Wii) or participating in marathon crossword puzzles or Sudoku? My own preferred remedy is to keep engaged with blogging (and random surfing – Stumble! – and reading books) and gardening (more on that later). But with all of that information – what shall we do? How to find the golf nuggets in all that gravel? 

For example, in my inventory of links (via Delicious) on this topic, I have several that I cannot simply discard because the implications are so roguish – so different and extraordinary compared to the standard publication(s) that adds another pebble to the ant hill busy being built by the troops involved in normal science. For example, there is a link about Impairments of Memory and Learning in Older Adults Exposed to Polychlorinated Biphenyls Via Consumption of Great Lakes Fish (Schantz, 2001)

Uh oh… that can’t be good – PCB exposure can affect memory and learning in adulthood?

Yep, afraid so.

Or for many people – there was the disappointing news that all those supplements of Ginkgo has not really been effective reducing the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but then there was this odd bit of news from the botanical front at The Ohio State University that indicated that marijuana reduces memory impairment (yes, the headline read: “Scientists are high on the idea…” – seriously). Wow…one plant showed initial promise (Ginkgo) and then all of sudden we get a hit of Cannabis (one toke over the line), which purports to reduce chronic inflammation in the brain. Well, these are keepers for me; but with all of the RSS feeders at work and elaborate database searches that are possible, it is mental challenge just to determine the all-important signal in all that noise. Sometimes it is necessary to remember and to forget. But with all the science (both the roguish and the pebbles on the ant hill), I have found that it is the humanities that help to provide creative balance, perspective, context, and contrarian viewpoints on our topic.

Let us start off with this one item: How many of you know of the collaborative work of William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh, and Kevin Begos, Jr. (1992) – Agrippa (a book of the dead)? Well, if you haven’t – it is a strange but perfect capturement of creative design on our topic of memory and forgetting. Agrippa is a work of art that was originally stored on a 3.5 floppy disk (remember those?) {And doubly ironic as well deal with memory – as in these days – a 5 GB memory stick is no big deal} and it would erase itself after a single use and the words and images in the book would eventually fade into oblivion due to the exposure to light. Wow – creative and perfectly orchestrated to the mental dilemma that is our life – our history – our ephemeral existence. Memories erased – our thoughts, and our experiences slowly fading – and then… gone.

But not so fast. Some artists take on the challenge of existence and memory and burn a significant imprint that would last for generations. Examples: Salvador Dali’s painting, The Persistence of Memory and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. Surrealism via Dali makes memory look like a very strange trip – indeed –, which perhaps it is. How else to account for the one-and-a-quarter million words of Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time – probably the all time whopper account of involuntary memory operations (also see Alain De Botton, Shattuck, 1983, and Schhlagman et al, 2007 references at end of posting below).

Another example: Like a few other readers on the planet, I consider the work (Okay, I guess The Board of the Modern Library thought so too), Ulysses by James Joyce to be monumental – and life altering – in its ability to transform the reader in many different ways. But as much as I have enjoyed reading the book, I never really appreciated how the role of memory has played as an undercurrent throughout Ulysses until coming across Rickard’s analysis of Joyce’s work. Rickard did a fine job of showing how Ulysses operated as a mnemotechnic – a literary operation of history and human development for James Joyce, and even though there is indeed an “industry” that surrounds the analysis of James Joyce works, Rickard’s (1999) book is simply indispensable in the understanding of importance of memory in the creative formation of literature – and as a motivator to create the one of the most important novels of our time.

And speaking of books, and time, and let us not forget – the movies! – we have the interesting polarities of memory. Total recall and complete memory loss which leads me to I recall, for example, my own discovery of the story written by Jorge Luis Borges titled, Funes, His Memory. It was the story of Ireneo Funes who would recite Pliny’s twenty-fourth book in Natauralis historia in Latin (with the subject of that chapter, ironically, on the topic of memory) and who he was before his fall from a horse which left him “blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory.” After the fall, Funes was transformed and his perception and memory were perfect, so that all that had ever happened to him was clearly available and accessible to Funes as though all of it were happening in the present. His memory was precise and sponge-like to all that he absorbed around him, but there was a catch. He could not overlook anything or create generalities. To him all was detail and newly minted in the memory. Nothing escaped. It was all there. All of it; whether he liked it or not.

Borges would descriptively write of the downsides to such a condition. First, there was the notion that every experience did become a memory. Let me repeat: every experience, every time, all of it, was etched as memorable, so much so that “Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every path of forest; but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf,” all of it, the leaf became a leaf became a leaf became a leaf became a leaf. It was like his mind was trapped in a hall of mirrors. I could not fathom the infinite regress, but after reading Borges story, it was then that I only had begun to appreciate the gift of remembering selectively.

This led me to think that I would prefer to know that I age across time as a cognitive flow of experiences, sliding along, adjusting and adapting, taking a little bit here, and forgetting some of that there. It would be preferable to get the reality check in incremental and small doses and not at every instance of perception. My mind would be like a catalogue of snapshots flipping at me like a rolodex the size of a ferris wheel; and for Funes? Well, as Borges put it, “His own face in the mirror, his own hands surprised him every time saw them.” He would go right back to cataloguing everything that he encountered. Everything! There was no “been there and done that”; rather, everything was subject to a place in his memory. All things were memorable.  And it was hard for him to sleep because “To sleep is to take one’s mind from the world” but that was not the case for Funes. Because all was a precise memory and every perception was an image to be reviewed without respite, it was all a relentless accounting of all that had been seen and experienced.

But here is the personal lesson for me: I want to remember and to re-weave and I also want to leave behind what is not needed. Perhaps it could be said this way: when I go on a trip, I don’t want to bring the house, I just need the suitcase for a while. Now, the condition of Funes has an eerie parallel to the movie Memento (released in 2000 – see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) in this regard: the short-term memory loss (anterograde amnesia) of Leonard Shelby. In the movie, Leonard was unable to form new memories, although he could remember events up until the night of the tragic murder of his wife and when (shortly thereafter) knocked unconscious like Funes.

Whereas memory was both a tragedy and treasure for Funes, for Leonard – memory was equivalent to deception and deceit. It was just a quick camera shot in the movie, but if one looked close enough, on Leonard’s arm was tattooed the lines, “Consider the source memory is treachery.” Leonard had tattoos as permanent records on his skin because they are the “facts” and in addition Polaroid photos don’t lie. Remember? Every Picture Tells A Story, Don’t It? (thanks to Rod Stewart) – But it also depends on how you see it. Right? Was it SG13-7IU or was it SGI3-71U? Or was it SGI3-71U? Leonard waxed philosophical about his condition given the circumstances. What can be trusted in our minds? The external (empirical) objects that held the clues and that represented the facts were more reliable, more dependable than the smoky and opaque images within our memories,

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.

            So says Leonard.

            In contrast, Funes found that memory is too reliable. He can’t close his eyes and have the world go away. It’s all there, every precise detail. There is no vagueness about it. Funes would want to escape to the bottom of a dark river because every time he looks into the mirror, it becomes yet another memory and now another. You and I might hope that “regular” memory would help to sort out the world into a comfortable arrangement of, “Oh yeah, that’s familiar, no need to exhaust energy yet again. Move on, it’s been filed away. Next!”

But Leonard wants to believe that when his eyes are closed, the world will still be there, as it was, and not as something different . . . and new.

“We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.”

Mirrors. Here we go again. Threads back to Umberto Eco and Borges.

Photographs to capture the truth. But what is it that I see? Ringo Starr was right when he sang,

“But all I’ve got is a photograph…As the years go by, and we grow old and gray.”

Old and gray – fading memories like the art work Agrippa –

The next time you go to the obituaries in the newspaper or some online cemetery site and you are able to view/scan the images of those who have departed and those who have become recent and distant memories in our thoughts – please try to reflect on these items:

Dante’s chilling lines: “An interminable train of souls pressed on, so many that I wondered how death could have undone so many.” (And see T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) to which you could build the bridge to the recent book, “The Brief History of the Dead,” by Kevin Brockmeier and then marvel at memory, life, and death.

And then Soren Kierkegaard’s classic statement –

One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence.

Thanks for the memories – Scott D. Wright  ~

And may I recommend the following materials for you?

(Via BoingBoing.net and posted by Cory Doctorow)
In 1992, William Gibson released “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)”, a haunting poem about loss and memory that came on a floppy disc that erased itself as you played it. Here’s a screen-capture of the Agrippa poem being read out inside a Mac classic emulator. There were other editions, even more esoteric, that you can read about on Wikipedia; as lovely a literary piece as this is, it was an even lovelier artifact. A “Run” of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” Poem from a Copy of Original 1992 Agrippa Diskette, Wikipedia on Agrippa (via Beyond the Beyond)

Baxter, C. (1999). The business of memory: The art of remembering in an age of forgetting. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.

Danzinger, K. (2008). Marking the mind: A history of memory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

De Botton, A. (1998). How Proust can change your life. New York: Vintage.

Draaisma, D. (2004). Why life speeds up as you get older: How memory shapes our past. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fara, P. Patterson, K. (Eds). (1998). Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gross, D. (2000). Lost time: Remembering and forgetting in late modern culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Halpern, S. (2008). Can’t remember what I forgot: The good news from the front lines of memory research. New York: Harmony Books.

Kandel, E. R. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Kotre, J. (1996). White gloves: How we create ourselves through memory. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Nilsson, L., & Ohta, N. (2006). Memory and society: Psychological perspectives. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Praz, M. (1967). Mnemosyne: The parallel between literature and the visual arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rickard, John S. (1999). Joyce’s book of memory: The mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Schlagman, S., Kvavilashvili, L., & Schulz, J. (2007).  Effects of age on involuntary autobiographical memories.
In J. Mace (Ed.) Involuntary memory. New York: Blackwell Publishing.

Shattuck, R. (1983). Proust’s binoculars: A study of memory, time and recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Terdiman, R. (1993). Present past: Modernity and the memory crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Thompson, R. & Madigan, S. (2005). Memory: The keys to consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Yates, F. A. (1966). The art of memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.