Author's Note 5: 'Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past'*

In my Author’s Note 4 ‘Memory underpins imagination’, I mentioned that I had just started reading Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough’s book about memory.

I’ve found it interesting to look at what I am doing in The Drying Rooms through the prism of what I learned about memory from this book, particularly because I was instantly intrigued by Fernyhough’s stated aim at the start of the book:

I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed – you create something new.

I have always sensed this, but have never been able to articulate what I mean by it.

There’s lots of detailed, fascinating stuff based on empirical research about the hippocampus, the amygdala, the frontal lobes, the neocortex and so on – but I’m not going to go into that. I’ll make a hash of it. Suffice to say, ‘The neural tentacles of memory spread far and wide, and many different brain systems are involved.’

But first, I said I’d let you know if my hunch about the title — Pieces of Light — referred to happy childhood memories. Well, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Childhood memories maybe, but nothing to do with happy or not happy. He cites examples of ‘bright shards’ and ‘light-filled mnemonic images’ that are often at the heart of people’s very earliest childhood memories. On reading this, I immediately thought of the turd sitting on the ‘glaring white, pristine path’ in Amman when I was three. That is indeed a memory dominated by a piece of light. [See Author’s Note 4: What was home?]

I have been writing The Drying Rooms without any real knowledge of the science and psychology of memory. But, as you know only too well by now, I have been going down into a deep – often very dark – place to try to replicate in writing the essential truth of ‘what happened’ and ‘how it felt’. But I am resisting the story-telling urge to fill in the gaps with a coherently constructed narrative, particularly in the more traumatic Cruel Matron memories. These memories (often on a repeating fragmented loop) are so strong, yet riddled with gaps. But — and here it gets weird and complicated — the Cruel Matron gaps aren’t empty. They resist being filled anyway. They are full of ectoplasmic dread and fear.  

Yet, despite thinking I am being true to the memories by not applying construction and coherence to them, apparently that is exactly what I am doing, whether I like it or not!

Construction and Coherence turn out to be key words in the current thinking about memory. Now that I have digested Fernyhough’s book, I have come to understand the precepts that, ‘Memories are changed by the very process of reconstructing them’ and ‘Memory-making is a constant struggle for coherence.’

Fernyhough establishes early on that the widely accepted view that memories are stored and retrieved like static possessions is rubbish. So much for my metaphor that some of my memories are unchanging ‘pebbles’ stored in my deep darkness!

Memories are not static items of ‘mental property’. The idea that a memory is ‘an intact, unchanging heirloom from the past stored inside the library of the human mind’ is a myth often perpetuated by popular culture, particularly stories and films like Harry Potter and Avatar.

This view of memories as physical things is guaranteed to mislead. The truth is that autobiographical memories are not possessions that you either have or do not have. They are mental constructions, created in the present moment, according to the demands of the present.

I remember totally believing in the dystopian premise in a Black Mirror TV episode in which brain-embedded microchips enabled people to appropriate other people’s memories and then play them like film clips in their own minds. If Fernyhough saw this episode, he was probably chucking things at the TV screen:

We now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings.

You’re telling me! What drives the reconstruction of my memories in The Drying Rooms are the feelings. Sometimes the visceral hotline to the emotions of sixty years ago is overwhelming. It really does feel like I’m tapping into my eight-year-old self. This is particularly the case when the memories are at their most fragmented, febrile and traumatic.  

And then of course, there’s this: ‘Everyone remembers the past differently, because everyone lives it differently.’

We all know how a moment or ‘event’ can be remembered very differently by the people who were there. This can be particularly fraught and destabilising when members of the same family, who all feel they ‘own’ the same memory disagree over not just the supposedly ‘factual’ details, but over each other’s emotional responses to it. Only recently, two of my family members had this exchange:

“I remember wishing you hadn’t cried.”

“But it wasn’t me who cried. It was you!”

But oh the relief when the intrinsic reliability of a memory is corroborated by the memories of others. Or, better still, endorsed by hard evidence [see Chapter Thirteen - Evidence]

When it comes to my memories of Cruel Matron in The Drying Rooms, I am fortified by the corroboration of others who also experienced her tyrannical regime on ‘G-Block’. (Thank you to those of you who have commented or messaged me.) One very dear friend who was at the school with me when I was eight is still integral to my life now. Over the years we have borne witness to each other’s overlapping memories of G-Block and Cruel Matron’s sadism and punishments, including ‘sitting out’ in the dreaded drying rooms. From her, and from many others (including those who experienced similar cruelties and emotional neglect in boarding schools other than mine), the corroboration is comforting and it’s always nice to be believed.

But the fact is — as Charles Fernyhough keeps reminding us — ‘the reconstructive nature of memory can make it unreliable’. And here comes a whopper (for me, at least):

Our memories of childhood in particular can be highly unreliable. Thinking differently about memory requires us to think differently about some of the ‘truths’ that are closest to the core of ourselves.

These words hit me hard. At first, I thought no, no, no … what? What are you saying, Charles? What truths? How unreliable? My whole bloody thing is predicated on my memories of childhood. You’ve just cut off my truth supply! I’m floundering. Help!

But then I calmed down and thought, yes, yes, yes … am I doing exactly what you say? Is the whole process of writing The Drying Rooms slowly releasing a different thinking about some of the truths that are closest to the core of me?

And is it no coincidence that I’m writing about this specific period of my childhood now? In the chapter he calls The Horror Returning, Fernyhough notes, ‘Our capacity to suppress traumatic memory seems to become weaker as we get older.’

Reliable or not, we all have memories that we fiercely own and protect. It can be really upsetting and destabilising if someone questions the core ‘trueness’ of a memory. And not just with the big-hitting memories. In The Drying Rooms I find myself occasionally being ridiculously obsessive over tiny, unimportant things. Even if the flow of writing would be better served by moving a door to the right or opting for one choice of memory (just say ‘nighties’ for god’s sake! You don’t have to say ‘it might have been pyjamas’). Sometimes, I am forensically possessive about what I feel to be the bits that make it mine.

Fernyhough illustrates the power of our attachment to certain memories. He describes a memory from when he was three years old and he is standing at the top of the stairs having just ‘shat’ his pants. He says that in the memory he can feel ‘the shame and wrongness’ of what he has done and he is ‘absolutely sure about the light from the lamp that hung over the banister at the foot of the stairs’. He says he would resist anyone’s efforts to undermine the reliability of the memory: ‘I would resist it because it is a part of me.’

One of the many new terms I learned while reading this book is ‘autonoetic consciousness’.

Autonoetic consciousness is the quality that puts you at the centre of your memories, so that you can relive the moments from the inside.

Fernyhough references Vladimir Nabokov here, noting that Nabokov said that we always feel at home in our pasts. We never feel like strangers.

There’ll be more on Nabokov’s writing and other works of art the next time I write an Author’s Note about memory.

*This and all the quotations are from Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory (2012) by Charles Fernyhough

---

If any of you want to comment on this post, please do.