Memory

Memory is the damnedest thing, when you think about it: it makes us who we are (in terms of the continuous sense of self that we reconstruct, unconsciously, every morning), and yet at the same time it is *itself* a construction - a conflation of externally-derived 'facts', stitched together by conscious and sub-conscious processes into a stable (but shifting) narrative of who we are, and who we were, and who we think we were. We bring our memories to the surface, sometimes actively, sometimes passively, and we draw upon them to bolster our sense of self, or to bolster our authority, and we largely treat them as if they are dredged up from a place where the truth holds: where facts are encoded objectively.

And so much of this activity goes on below the level of consciousness. At work the other day, I stood in the queue at the coffee 'pod' (or stall, or counter - whatever you will), and as usual my mind was racing over the immediate problems of the working day: why did that idiot do that? how am I going to be able to fit that task in alongside all the other things I have to do? why won't that new 'barista' hurry up? why am I projecting my stress and impatience onto that poor sod? how can I reconcile the reality of my business-drone existence with my self-image as a free-spirited creative socialist?

Eventually, I ordered my habitual morning latte, paid my money, and moved off around the curve of the counter front to the coffee-collection area (I am a well-trained consumer and know how to insert my corporeal being into the various production lines that I participate in). As I took my first step I bumped into the floor-standing metal frame that holds the 'queue here' sign for the coffees stall - some inconsiderate operative had sited it about eight inches away from its usual position; I must have made that ‘pay-and-then-go-to-the-collection-area’ move hundreds of times, and my brain had embedded all the elements of this activity into a routine that runs automatically, below the level of conscious thought. As I steadied the twanging metal of the sign, the woman at the collection point in front of me said 'I just did that as well'. We commiserated with each other, and I shifted the sign back to its usual position to save anyone else the embarrassment of knocking it over. 

It's a trite observation, I know, but I still think it's true that a lot of the time we are not really 'present' but are away in a seemingly separate mental world, while our bodies are negotiating the angles, planes and solid structures of the external world for us. Memory, and 'muscle memory' - the auto-generated behaviour of the motor cortex that carries us through the day: running our heart, moving our limbs, working our lungs, digesting our food, driving our cars, controlling the hundreds of actions as we write ourselves a note or tap out an email at the keyboard.

At the moment the model I have in my head about how *conscious* (purposive/directed/active) memory works is based on the idea of a labyrinth: when I follow a memory trace, it's as if I am in a dark, stone-built corridor, with a candle or lamp in my hand. I pass along through mainly familiar passageways, illuminating walls and archways that I recognise, but mostly my attention is on the thing that I’m searching for in the gloom; the stuff off to the sides is merely peripheral, and I don’t linger, or dodge off into the side-passages to see where they lead. And so it’s as if you’re always walking along pretty much the same path, over and over again, reinforcing the familiar retelling of the landmarks and increasing the likelihood that the same images and associations will be drawn forth when you set out on that path the next time.

This metaphor is itself built - in part - out of imagery from a book I first read in the 1970s - Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy; there’s a section where Flay, the Earl of Gormenghast’s servant, is stalking his angular way along ‘The Stone Lanes’, a network of passageways that riddles the great castle, and which are hidden away behind the walls of the castle’s public spaces. Flay is being followed by the young Steerpike, who is lost. As he tries to keep pace with Flay, the servant’s figure is alternately silhouetted  and illuminated by the burning torches that hang in niches, creating a particular rhythm of light and darkness. 

I think this image stuck with me because I associated it with a couple of dark/light rhythms that I had previously experienced. Firstly, I had memories of being in the back of a car as it drove along a road at night. I remember lying across the seat, feeling the vibration of the road being transmitted through my cheek and the bones of my head, and noticing the way that the intensity of the orange-yellow street lamps would  wax and wane as you approached and then passed them: I tried to track the growth of the light and fix the point where the angles of the light were momentarily fixed before they flipped to the ‘diminishing intensity’ configuration, and the interior dimmed again before the car entered the next cone of light. Secondly, I had a memory of lying in bed as a child at night, with the curtains closed, and how the headlights of the cars on the main road  would create similar rhythmic patterns as the cars approached and passed the house: that same puzzle of trying to work out the pattern of angles, intensity, and the flipping point between approach and recession. I could also remember the disappointment/frustration of not being able to work it all out and visualise it all in my mind.

Now, I realise that all three of these memory components - Flay, the car interior, the bedroom - had interpenetrated each other, and modified each other, creating a cluster of associated elements that they now shared, but which had not all been present at the time when the original experiences occurred. And now, with the years of repeated recall overlaid, they are embodied in neat narratives that treat the experiences as if they were separate, distinct and objectively factual, rather than being smoothed conflations that suit the purposes of my remembering.

In contrast, *involuntary* memory seems to take you to different places, in different ways: down corridors and pathways that you had forgotten about, places where you haven’t shone the light for a long time - places that you had forgotten even existed. I am sometimes amazed by the power of this kind of sudden, unbidden memory - the way that a burst of bright light opens up a vista of colour and detail that you didn’t even know you had registered (albeit which are still subject to the ‘active reconstruction’ mechanisms that are operating in the realms of active remembrance).

Sometimes a sentence or a phrase, or a piece of music or TV footage, or a scent, will suddenly bring a flare of light into the gloom of the memory labyrinth, and a chain of associations will spring into life in colour and with texture, like Marcel’s memories of Balbec in Proust’s novel. Whereas Marcel’s initiating stimulus was a cake and cup of lime tea, mine tend - at the moment - to be image-based. 

One such trigger happened the other day, when I somehow happened across the packaging artwork for an old Airfix model kit: in this instance a Spitfire Mk. IX.

As soon as I saw this picture I was transported back to my childhood bedroom in suburban Greater London, with the contents of the model kit’s polythene bag spread out on some newspaper on the floor (I can also remember the crusty bits of the red carpet where polystyrene cement had found its way past the newspaper; and the tacky feel of the glue on your fingers; and the way that the fabric of the carpet felt when you tried to rub the glue into it/off of it so that your mum wouldn’t realise that you had made a mess…). In these memories, my friend Stephen Holmes is present: we used to buy these kits at the toyshop over the road, and then rapidly build them in parallel; I recall the Spitfire and a Hawker Typhoon in this context.

And even as I write this I can start to see how our brains are doing us a favour by not allowing us to keep remembering everything we have ever experienced: the curtains of habit are powerful and keep most of the unstoppable flow of association invisible from us for most of the time - otherwise we would be overwhelmed. At the same time, I feel a real thrill of recognition as these memories and their associations start to spill over  - the same kind of recognition and sense of validation that you feel when someone on one of those ‘I Love the 70s’ programmes reminisces about some object or cultural artefact that you were particularly enamoured of in your childhood (e.g. a Chopper bike, or an Arctic Roll, or a 7-inch single version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep playing on a stackable record player in a sunlit summer room). 

I realise that these model-making and associated memories are deeply embedded and very important to me at some level: I spent so much time around war-related toys and models when I was a child that they have become bound up with my sense of my own history, the formation of my self, and the way that I look at the world. And they are also associated with family, with family relationships, and with particular moments and seasons of experience, all tied together and blurred together in a rich mixture of sensory memories, emotions and reconstructed narratives.

The very richness of all of these associations - buried, rediscovered, re-embellished, renewed - makes you think that you must hang on to them and value their content: as if they are imbued them with a significance and importance by the very fact of their vividness, depth and actuality. They make you who you are. Partly this is pure nostalgia and self-indulgence, but I think that without them you would be different, poorer in spirit, and diminished - even if you are only half-aware of them most of the time. The hinterland of the brain is so rich and constantly amazing.