Memory

Memory, & its tricks, is much on my mind at the moment. Why, you might ask. At present I’m reading “The Song House” by Trezza Azzopardi, a novel. The two main characters are having problems with memory. One has early stages dementia & losing his memory, the other is trying to regain her memory from her childhood, when something traumatic happened to her, the details of which she can no longer remember. Snippets of song play throughout, in particular Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable”.

There’s no denying two people do not have the same memory of the same event. To some extent that must reflect that each is looking at that event with a different consciousness, from a different angle. It sometimes amazes me when talking to my stepbrother or a childhood friend, how different a memory they have. They’re all a few years older than me, all being more my brother’s friends at the time. It may be I’m looking at things from a younger perspective, from that of one still a child when they have become more adult. Or it may be the fact I was more on the periphery of the circle rather than in the centre.

I suspect, too, we sort our memories in terms of what seem to us most significant at the time. When the Fox & I reminisce of times long gone by there often seems a different colour to things, reflective of our own understanding of the situation.

The Fox was once in a terrible accident. This was long before he met me, when he was just a teenager, but to this day he cannot remember exactly what happened when he was hit by the moving vehicle, just waking up in hospital later.

Yet at the same time, memory is precious. So many of my blogs have included memories of times gone by, of people much loved. Without memory life would be frightening, as memory is an essential tool for making sense of the world & what is happening in it. Indeed that is why so many people with dementia are so terrified & disorientated.

Maybe that’s part of my fascination with history. Without that historical memory I do not understand how you can make sense of the modern world. For me it would be like floating in a vacuum. I live in a world with a time dimension.

With memory you learn, hopefully develop as a person. So many opinions formed are based on memories of things past. Remembered experiences temper you into the person you become.

Sometimes your appreciation of remembered things changes as your own life experiences change you, things that didn’t make sense straighten out into some sort of order. These days I marvel at the idea of my mother going around in leathers on a motor bike in the 1920s, or the courage to set off on her own for Malaya to marry a man she hadn’t seen for over a year. At the time she told me of these things I thought nothing of it, but at the time she told me I was just a child. I was only 24 when she died.

With our travels we are trying to lay down good memories for when we are too old & doddery to manage the travel any longer. Such memories will help us continue to travel in our minds, even if not geographically. They will be memories that will give us something to share for the rest of our lives however long we live or however decrepit we have become.

Long live memory.