Cracker Jacks and faux wood grained dining room tables lined the small hallway of my first place of residence after my moving out. In the years that have passed since then I can only recall the remarkable whereabouts of my own internal clock as it pointed me down some poignant corridor of which I was unaware. In the midst of the moving out I had forgotten to pick up childhood memories which were later decimated in a fire that torched the home. It was within the sentimentality of these items being reduced to ash and the memories of them that I final could ponder the meanings.
It also gave way for me to ponder the fear that one day my mental capabilities would fail me and I would be forever grasping at straws to remember everything that drove the feelings for these items. In that midst I became lost into the smell of these items. Never, even then, could I recall vivid memories but only memories of sleeping or playing with the items as well as the way they smelled. It’s like the times you step into an old house and you reel for a second once a smell hits your nose. It’s a feeling like you know this place and its secrets when in reality it’s just your mind recognizing the smell and trying to place it with preexisting memories while observing the place you’re in.
That reeling has always been my favorite part of my memories, like that house held some long lost secrets of which I could not remember. As if I had existed in this place before yet unable to remember because who I was when these secrets unfolded only echoes inside of me, a faint trace of a former life. Not a reincarnation if you will but a memory residing in my makeup of atoms and quarks and stardust.
Now there has never actually existed this hallway lined with Cracker Jacks and fake wood tables, nor has any of my childhood items been destroyed in a fire. Hell, I’ve recently moved back home after an unsuccessful excursion to Tampa; though I miss the town and my friends there and want to go back. I also am not quite sure where I stand on this idea of memory residing in our makeup though in a reincarnation sort of way. I do however wonder about that reeling feeling because it almost feels like I’m reaching some understanding of the place before it is snookered away by the mystery of the senses mingling. To me it feels akin Poe saying that, “All experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely.” and Solnit’s response that what Poe is saying is that one must, “…recognize the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.” When that spin hits it’s our being keeping balance between echoes of memory with the present load on the senses. It’s our being saying, “Hey, I remember something or was it a dream?”
It is a most wondrous pondering to think of the Conservation of Mass in correlation with our existence especially in terms of our memories. Is it possible that our memories aren’t just the essence of our being but somehow tied into our lives? There has to be something more than just wires in the brain getting crisscrossed with when we entering places and the smells hit our nose to cause us to whirl. According to Henri Bergson there are two types of memory with one being habitual memory and the other true memory. The habitual memory is memory that is repetitively assigned a place in our minds while true memory are what we consider the memory of past events. This true memory has no actual place, it’s that spirit or our essence. I need to actually check out the book which I shall after I finish the three I have by Solnit.
I’m not sure where I’ll come out after these readings but I still just have this feeling in my gut that the mystery of memory will never be completely solved. It has been a philosophical question for time out of mind to what are memories really are. Selectionism seems to believe the same as Bergson and for expansion on this whole question will lead me to academic research. Still, I can’t get that feeling out of my mind every time I come upon a place that I’ve never been before.
Maybe someday I’ll walk into a room and it’ll be a hallway lined with empty boxes of Cracker Jacks or faux wood tables or maybe not. Imagination is a wild and crazy beast that we’ve lost touch with. Someday we might prove that these true memories have no actual bases in reality; which will be quite saddening. I like to think though that there’s something much more going on, more convoluted that we can imagine for if it’s possible as in Eternal Sunshine to delete select memories then they can’t be separate from us…at least I don’t think so.
For the Rest of Us... 