Falling Memory

Abstract

Unlike most memories, I know exactly how this one was triggered. This doesn’t mean I understand the intricacies involved in the complex cellular transactions that make remembrance possible. The way in which the past is stored in the incredible honeycomb of processes that is our brain, and how we retrieve from its labyrinths our pictures of all the time we’ve passed through, of every moment prior to this one, belongs to a language in which ordinary discourse is not fluent. I know nothing of the biochemistry involved in remembering. My knowledge of this particular memory’s provenance extends no further than the shallows of self-consciousness. In plotting its genealogy—or at least the short stretch of its bloodline I can see—I am, therefore, only dealing with the face values of recall, not the underlying elements that shape their features into the familiar likenesses we recognize. Such obvious physiognomy reveals nothing about the genetics of memory, but it does cast light on the manner in which we unravel our histories into a series of fractional images, from whose threads we can weave up again at least some part of the fabric of what happened. Such reweavings provide neither the tapestry of documentary nor the fabrication of imagination, but a tightly spun mix of both—another reminder that experience and interpretation are intimately conjoined and that what we take to be reality is conjured from their intimate entanglement. We are so entwined with the world that to think us capable of offering an account of it unmarked by the shadow of our presence is as odd a conceit as supposing fish could engineer a land-dweller’s vision of the ocean.