Memory and Reflection

I am reading The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. Of course, I have not read her famous and awarded memoirs myself. I’m kind of a no-more-book-buying kick, since I have so many and most I have not read.

She knows her memoirs. Although I am reading it for inspiration and guidance to pen my own memoir, which will be arrogantly title A Life Like No Other, or less so, Private Geography, I have read relatively few of them and I am learning about the genre.

Memoir is a literary “memory.” Memory fascinates me, as I study learning and learning is mostly about memory. One thing we do know: Memory doesn’t exist without rehearsal.

And Memory is not mimetic. We are not videocameras.

Rehearsal of our own, saying and reprocessing the new information or experience soon after it happens.

Rehearsal over time. Something tied to event, or someone, sends us back on those tracks.

Memory v. imagination. Reflecting on the memory, rehearsing the incident and what we remember in a new context (psychological as well as physical) will change the memory and thus each succeeding time we rehearse it, it transforms a little big.

Rehearsal from input. We have memories that are not fully our own but filtered, strained through the retellings of our families. This is especially true of childhood memories.

When I was 19, I took a road trip from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Waverly, Iowa. Why is not important here. In Davenport, Iowa, which is on the Mississippi River, we stopped for gas rather later (it was after dark in late May). I turned around and saw my youth pastor from high school, whom I hadn’t seen in over two years and whom I’d lost track of. It was amazing “coincidence”—he had recently moved there, and Davenport, Iowa, was nowhere near my home of Prince George’s County, Maryland, or my college home of Chattanooga.

I have told that story many times in my marriage, and now my husband think he was there and that it happened when we were traveling by car to Iowa (again from Chattanooga) for a wedding about six years later.  I do not correct him; there would be no point. He now has that memory, even though it didn’t happen to him or with him.

Memory is part of what makes us human. Memory makes art, language, music. Memory comforts and terrorizes us. But it is not perfect.