Memory is a tricky thing, if you consider it. Or, if you just take me as an example.
I'm wondering how I can have any clear-sighted take on reality or any solid memories, when I'm so confused most of the time. Don't you need to know what's going on at the time a memory forms to have a clear recollection?
I don't think I am either the dumbest or the brightest person in the world. I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle, and that my experiences are not that much different than most anybody else’s. Yet, if I have a hard time keeping track of what's going on around me at the time, following the storyline being told to me, digesting in a reasonable way all the information that's being thrown at me, then how am I to sort out some event 15 years later, as some strong personal moment, as a memory?
Somehow, through all this, I still have memories. Some of them are strong and mean very much to me.
Absalom Absalom! is Faulkner's tale about memory. It is one of the most confusing stories I know of. And as near as I can understand it, he dealt with memory in a way that I’m thinking of here. His approach seems to be pretty realistic to me. Memory is pretty slippery stuff. It’s like a water balloon. No, that's not it, water balloons have real edges. Maybe it's sort of like a blob of Jell-O floating in a hot tub. (Sorry, that’s the best I can do.)
What I'm getting at is, the more you look at memory, the less you know what it is. Memory just doesn't stand up to rigor. It seems illogical. Probably that’s why it's good to write things down,
But if you consider the difficulty you have in deciphering what it is that’s really going on around you at the moment, then, you must admit, that what you write down is not very likely to be something that will inspire confidence. Can it be in any real way,”accurate”?
Still, we claim to have memories.
We all think that we have a past and that there is a story to our lives. We may even believe there is a plot. These moments and memories are very important to us, they help us define the world and where we are in it.
Maybe, however, memory is not memory at all, maybe it's just context. Maybe we don't have a consistent memory. Maybe it keeps shifting and warping as we make new friends, grow older and change where we live.
But memory defines us. It defines who we are. It gives us our identity and we hold onto that, sometimes quite dearly. We identify with the world through our memories. Regardless of how fragmentary or blatantly false they may be, we think they are meaningful and real. But if you think about it, as your memories shift, and is your context changes, your identity warps as well. What seems so important to you, your identity, maybe as vacuous and as vaporous as a blob of Jell-O floating in a hot tub.