Thanks for the Metaphors

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Memory is a strange thing. It is universal and yet unique. Universally, memories are little pieces of spacetime that when knitted together, create the picture of our life gone by. Yet, we experience them uniquely, and since, as my sister recently pointed out to me, we cannot see inside each other’s heads, the only memory we can experience is our own. In this attempt to come to grips with this unique yet universal phenomenon, I find myself falling back on my old buddy, metaphor.

I mention my sister because we have been discussing memory. My initial inclination is to say that her’s is much better than mine, and by most traditional measures it is. However, for the moment let me quibble just a bit and merely assert that it is different from mine.

You see, her son and his wife “gave” her StoryWorth. The quotes are there because StoryWorth is an Internet-based gift that presents the recipient with topics about their life, topics that are generated by the givers. The recipient then creates a response; a story, essay, photos, copies of documents, etc. For example, “Who was your favorite childhood friend? “What was the “best” place you ever lived?” Stuff like that. Then, when the “subscription” is complete, the collected responses, which were shared with a small circle of friends and family online, are then compiled into a real, analog, "hold-in-your-hand” book. Margaret brought a copy along when we had dinner recently. I have only now had a chance to sit down and really spend some time with it. Oh. My. Or as digispeak would have it, OMG!

I had read the individual “chapters” online, but the physical book was a radically different experience. Margaret’s responses were staggeringly thorough and insightful, gracefully sketching a decades-long mural of a life that evolved in parallel to my own.  Sometimes achingly similar, other times totally alien. But always detailed to an extent that far surpassed my ability to recall. “How did she do that?” I wondered. And with the zeal of the almost fully retired, I set out to find out. Being still a media-guy, I turned to texting. I include the follow exchange with Margaret’s permission:

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ME: Hi. I have been looking at the StoryWorth books, and a question comes to mind. Where did all the content come from? Obviously you have some journals and stuff, but there seems to be an incredible amount of “memory” going on. I’m playing with a Wall about memory and was curious about yours. We have both read mysteries in which characters with photographic memories play a role. Mine doesn’t even approach those heights, quite the contrary on occasion! How about you?

MARGARET: Well. That’s a great question. Bill (Her husband - RLS) and I have talked about our vastly different abilities in remembering things, trying to tease out the differences. I keep saying “Don’t you just have a picture of x in your mind?”  And he says “No, only you have that.” Do I have a photographic memory? I don’t know. The only memory I know is mine, lol. It’s very visual and detailed and apparently quite different from his. I have trouble putting myself in his head, trying to imagine what his memories look like if they don’t look like mine.

Yes, I apparently have an excellent memory. I’m constantly saying “just a minute, let me picture that” and then I can find the sought after object, or remember the event or conversation, etc.Did I have source materials for a lot of the book? Absolutely. And I also found that just looking at some of the photos triggered a cascade of other very vivid memories. Some of them seemed as real as only yesterday. I guess if there are degrees or levels of photographic memory, then I’m definitely on the spectrum (haha) and I guess pretty far to the positive side. It would be fun to sit and talk about our memories sometime. If that doesn’t answer your question, shoot me more probing questions and I’ll answer them. But email would be easier on my finger.

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“Wow,” I wondered. “Why does she get to be on the eidetic memory spectrum, while I have trouble recalling the names of my college suite mates?” But then my battered self-confidence resurged and I thought, not necessarily better memory, perhaps just different. And that was when I began to think about the various metaphors for memory that might begin to explain the different “memory styles” manifested by my sib and I.

First, I had to wrestle with the notion of what is a “memory” other than an incredibly over-used meme in popular musical theater? It is, I decided, a slice of spacetime, unique to our existence, which led, naturally, I thought, to the flip book metaphor for memory. In a recent post I admitted to the fact that there were times - probably in 4th or 5th grade - when my attention was not actually riveted upon what was being discussed in class. One way I passed the time was to create little cartoons on the corners of the pages of my text books. You know, you draw little frame-by-frame stick figures on the corner of the pages, and then when you flip the pages you can make the little figure run off the page.

In David Baldacci’s books featuring Amos Decker, an FBI agent with an eidetic or photographic memory, he describes Decker’s memory this way, a sort of flip book on steroids, but his analogy is more 21st century - Decker replays things he has experienced like “playing back a DVD, frame-by-frame.” You get the idea. Everything you have ever experienced in your life is stuck up there somewhere between you ears. Folks who are, to use my sister’s phrase, “on the photographic memory spectrum,” apparently can access those experiences, and intentionally examine each frame, or clusters of frames and hence “remember” what happened in great detail.

Let me be clear, my memory works nothing like that. My memory works more like driving west down the largely undeveloped Route 66 back in the sixties with “roadside rests,” featuring single picnic tables usually next to a motel with a two word name like The Pines or Easy Rest. You accessed each unit directly from the parking lot. One door. One window. Sometimes with an air conditioner. Often there was a postage stamp sized swimming pool and a breezeway with a Coke machine. And there was this time just before sunset with the sun directly in your eyes, when driving became painful and you would find yourself pulling into the parking lot outside an Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell painting. My memory works something like that.

OK, While that metaphor makes perfect sense to me, I realize I need to unpack it a bit. The "driving west just before sunset” part comes from the retina resurfacing experience that accompanies driving west at that maddening time of day when the sun is sitting on the horizon, below the spot where the sun visor can block it.  The blacktop starts to shimmer and you are reduced to driving along one-handed while using your other hand to block the sun.  But then occasionally when you do manage cancel the glare, all the stuff that was lost around the edges of your compromised vision creeps back in again, but somehow muted in pastels. Eventually those images gradually return to hi def when the sun drops below the horizon and ceases its frontal attack. Exhausted, you turn off the highway, pulling over a cracked concrete parking lot to a Hopper/Rockwell world. You get out, rub your eyes, arch your back, stretch your legs and look around.  

It is that fade from harsh glare through more gentle hues and, eventually, to recalled clarity that best describes the full range of my memory.

You see there are bits and pieces, faces and places, that so dominate in my memory that many other aspects get pushed into a kind of mental hibernation. You will notice that I subtly avoid the f-word, which in this case is get  “forgotten” and the various derivations of the root “f-word.” I make this distinction because in many instances I don’t really “forget” the supporting cast of my life - the strange camp counselor who taught us knife throwing, Mickey Fitzgerald, the earliest “girlfriend” can remember from first grade, the giant teddy bears that Mom made for Margaret and I one Christmas, but in an iconic Mom-like snafu, stuffed them with some itchy industrial foam, the Great Rock Show featuring two or three different types of quartz and granite scrounged from local construction sites - those smaller moments are all still there. As are many of the faces of the 20 or 30 thousand students I have taught in my 40 years in various college classrooms. 

The point is that, for me, those supporting cast members of my memories get washed out by the leads; those other bits and pieces, faces and places that burn so brightly that I still see them when I close my eyes at night, that populate the music I listen to ceaselessly. It is not that I value the supporting cast members any less - I just do not “see” them all that clearly. One of the first things any young stage actor is taught is how to “find your light.” This is different from hitting your spot in a performance designed to be filmed. In those cinematic instances, you hit your spot on the set and it is up to the director to get the camera to you. In live theater a spotlight illuminating a particular point on a stage will hit actors of different heights in different places. You want to, no, you need to, find your light. Only then do you feel that magical bloom on your face, the warmth that assures you that, yes, the audience loves you - or hates you, if that is your objective. 

The “leads" in my memories are those bright lights on my unique stage, bright, dominant, unceasingly precious.  But often it is their intense glow that allows me to peak around in the shadows for the supporting cast resting there in Hooper’s poignant cafes or Rockwell’s impossibly resonant scenes of everyday life. And there they are, not as magnetic as the leads, but then without them the stage would be bare.

So, no, I certainly do not have a hi-def photographic memory. But with occasional nudging it can turn out a pleasing pastel.

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