On Memory: A Memorial Day Reflection

It is interesting, on Memorial Day, to contrast the many famous writers who write from personal experience with the way we do not allow high school and college students to draw on that same source for their own writing most of the time.

Hemingway, to note one famous example, wrote of the importance of remembering places, streets, and names of regiments rather than slogans* when thinking about the loss of people in the first Great War. All of his writing life, he worked quickly from personal experiences, as his critics noted. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, he wrote after coming back from a Fiesta in Spain.

Some have argued that the electro-shock therapy he received late in life to treat his depression robbed him of his main source for writing—his short term memory of his experiences.

Except for creative writing classes, we don’t generally have assignments for students to practice writing from experiences and to practice short or long term memory. They are taught to write from sources and to avoid personal opinion. It would seem that a full, vibrant writing program would draw on all forms of writing, not just research.

Of course, to write from experience is to draw on memory, which we understand is not reliable. It is important to provide support. 

A Series of Gaps

Recently, I was writing about a road trip I took with friends after college in 1979. As I remembered it, three of us traveled together. But then, after finishing a second draft, I found picture from that trip in a drawer. In the picture I had taken when we stopped at a rest area in North Dakota, there on the hood of my friend’s car was her German Shepard.

I had forgotten we had traveled with the dog. I had forgotten about the unwashed fur and dog breath as it panted and licked my hand and leaned against my knee when I had my turn in the back seat.

Hemingway, in writing his first novel, of course, left his wife out of the story. Hadley, his first wife, had been with him to the Fiesta and bull fights. He was, of course, writing fiction.

An even more recent example of the unreliability of my own memory concerns a TV show. Recently, my wife and I were trying to remember if we had watched the second season of a series on Netflix. I thought we had and were waiting for the third season to be posted. But she went ahead and started watching the second season, and it turned out I was wrong. I had somehow forgotten that we had only seen the first season.

I don’t remember phone numbers either. I remember my best friend's phone number from 1967, but I only remember my own cell phone number because I have written it down so much. Writing seems to be one way to remember things. Sometimes I will, like Hemingway, try to write things down soon after they happen. I do this in my journal. 

  

Aids to Memory

Communities, cultures, nations, of course, seek to honor and retain events they feel important for the collective memory. Holocaust memorials exist to help us remember. We argue over whether or not Confederate monuments should be kept up, while there are no monuments in Tianamen Square to mark the 1989 student demonstrations for democracy. According to an Atlantic Monthly article, government cameras keep a constant vigil over the square to prevent any outbreaks of commemoration, though candlelight vigils are held in Hong Kong to honor the pro-democracy event.

The ancient Greeks compared memory to impressions made in wax. Sigmund Freud wrote that writing was one way to support and “guarantee” memory. I marvel at this when I page through journal entries I wrote thirty-five years ago and realize that I have written the names of people and our conversations, but I no longer remember who “Sally” was.

Freud also praised a technology he called the ‘mystic writing pad,” which I recognize as a toy I played with in elementary school. Freud’s mystic pad consisted of a black, wax-like board, over which were layered a white-gray plastic sheet, and then a transparent plastic sheet. I remember writing—etching into—the sheets over the black board and creating words or pictures. When I grew bored with this, I would pull the sheets away from the board, and doing this would clear the sheets—presto, like erasing a board.

The thing I noticed when I did that, though, was what interested Freud. There, on the black board, were the marks of my etchings, layered over other etchings from other times of writing. The etchings over this black board was what Freud saw as consciousness—the traces left on the surface as memories, crossed over with newer memories etched in later.

Technologies of Memory

Memory has been compared to many technologies. I remember during the 1970s, when we would talk about memory tapes. It was as though somewhere deep in our brains there was a tape recorder technology recording everything. Hypnotize us, and the unvarnished, uncorrupted true tape of our lives could be revealed. This is a little too much like the ancient idea of memory and wax. 

More recently, we refer to downloading files of memory. Computers provide fine metaphors. 

But that “mystic writing pad” Freud liked, I think, best captures the precious, fragile, and fragmented nature of human memory.

And to support that humanity, having a public day to remember those we've lost to war is a fitting way to keep those we've lost near us and in mind. 

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*This is a bad paraphrase from his novel about World War I, A Farewell to Arms.