To be is to remember. To remember is to recognize.
But even when we have no memory, we have recognition. The newborn infant has an undeveloped sense of self, and few definitive memories, but it can still recognize its mother’s face, its father’s voice. It can recognize the pattern on the ceiling of the nursery. It can recognize the feeling of the cotton blanket it grasps in its tiny hands. And it can recognize pain. It recognizes pain from the memory of birth.
I can remember my grandparents and the days I spent with them as I grew into adulthood. Those memories, however, are not vivid. They’re not like playing Second Life, where you see simulated 3D animation, interact with the environment, hear audio, and even experience things vicariously. You never see your memories or re-experience them in any way unless you’re on some powerful hallucinogens.
Think of your own memories. A family gathering from your youth. Do you remember what words were spoken, other than a few select phrases of dialogue that your memory has paraphrased over time? Can you remember the exact sequence of events, even from a significant moment during that occasion? Have you ever recalled the subtleties of the expression on your grandmother’s face as she tried to comfort you when you cried? Would you be able to recollect what time it was, what the weather was, what happened outside in the whirling world where your parents were dying, dying apart from you in that secret other place that lies outside your peripheral vision?
Sure, you can remember a vague image or two, but it’s just a hazy afterimage. And you think you know someone’s voice, but try to call it to mind if you haven’t heard that person for years. Can you perfectly recall how someone would sound if they said something to you?
Now recognition, that is another thing. You may not be able to re-experience a memory, but you can recognize a recorded image or sound because recognition is the evidence of memory. That’s how we have proof that we remember more than we can recall. Have you ever recognized something that seems to have no context whatsoever in your daily life or in your memories? You call it déjà vu, attribute it to some kind of vagrant memory from another lifetime, even though you have no personal evidence that would suggest that you have been reincarnated. Or else you call it precognition, a hint of the future, and wait for the meaning to become apparent. But the experience merely becomes another memory, and the memory dissipates like steam vapors.
Then one day you are talking and laughing with a group of friends, and the clock is displaying the time, and a wine bottle is resting half empty on the floor, and a chord of music is sustained, sustained, and then the flame is dancing on the candle wick, and a woman glances toward you as if she recognizes you, and suddenly you realize that you recognize her, too, and suddenly your grandmother’s voice is as clear in your mind as if it were a digital playback, and yet you feel you must have forgotten something critical because the factor of recognition is so potent, so pronounced.
I always believed that if I can be here now, if I can be wholly in the present without any regard for past or future, then I can store memories that are as precise and objective as watching a digital movie. So much memory is caged inside our minds, growling restlessly within the darkest depths of those grey vaults. Is there a way to release them? And what gaps would we see between our selective recall and the objective facts of experience? Or is all experience subjective, no matter how lucid the memory of it? Our memories are always our own, not those of another person, not a collective impression, never a shared memory between many minds.
Never shared.
Gaine Ellard, 2007
