In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I
remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or
lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my
mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When
I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists
have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which
case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the
object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is
direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the
object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral
memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and
associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my
having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This
suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very
different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and
fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip
away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was
forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something
that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll
mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can
directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the
event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I
often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the
sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden
memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates
with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.
However, this kind of lateral memory, with its suddenness
and its frustrations, is only one aspect of lateral memory. The other aspect relates
memory to the daydream – it is the memory dream. In fact, in the 1990s, I tried
to write a book using the memory dream as a methodological principle. Take an
object or event – a humble spoon, or looking out the window – and specify its
real instances. That is, touch in your
present, mentally touch, the spoon or the looking in its stark and naked
particularity. Say the spoon is a
measuring spoon, part of a set of measuring spoons made of some cheap pewter
like material and bound together with a ring, with measurements imprinted on
the handle: 2 oz, 5 0z, etc. Or take the window that you looked out of in your
ground apartment in Austin on 45th street, decades ago. That view
was really a nonview, comprising a sidewalk, some raggedy bamboo plants, and a
large dull brown fence that was evidently erected to keep the residents in the
cheap apartment house that I was living in – marginals all – from peering at
the apartment complex next to us, where it was all swimming pools and nice cars
and barbecue on the patio. Here, the logician’s great tool – quantification –
breaks down, since it really isn’t clear what divides one looking out from the
other. The turn of the head? The mental act of attention? Is looking even defined
by consecutive looking, or is the lookings out the window that are divided by
other events unified by the intention to look out the window – I say, for
instance, I wazs looking out the window, waiting for the landlord.
Quantification is, however, a way to get into the memory game – because the fun
in the game is to pose these questions so that gradually you broaden the memory
dream, you remember, unexpectedly, the waxed paper into which your mother
poured the flour mix for the cupcakes, you remember where it was kept in the
cabinet, you remember the other things in the cabinet and the smell of vanilla,
etc. In a sense, instead of fishing around in memory, here we are treating it
as a jigsaw puzzle. And one that is not, it should be noted, played on one
horizontal plane – for the connotation of looking out the window can lead you
backwards and forwards in time to other lookings out of other windows. The goal
is to cut through the cloud of essences in which the particulars in our life have been wrapped. The routines, which excavate the particularity of an event and
substitute a likeness of that event – I remember the window not as it looked,
smudged, the yellowing curtain in suspense above it, on some particular moment
of some particular day, but I remember the essence of looking out the window, a
composite of watchings.
Happy days, wiling away my time in the memory dream!
It is said that the Emperor Rudolph of Bohemia, who had one
of the largest collections of curiosities in Europe, possessed a vial in which
was held the dust from which the Lord made Adam. This is a curiosity indeed,
maybe the Ur-curiosity. There’s a number of paradoxes involved in this object.
Was this dust the remnant, the leftovers, of the dust from which Adam was made –
or did Adam have two bodies, one of human flesh, the other of dust. Memory
seems to give us a parallel paradox. We, too, contain the motes of which we are
made, the instances that memory represents. Yet the container, here, is
identical to the sum of those motes – just as Adam was both that dust and a
divine animal. The artist in me would like to collect every mote, every jot. An
impossible grab and snatch expedition, granted, but one I am eternally tempted
to launch, to lose myself in, finding that lost, interior Eldorado.
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