Category Archives: Memory

Memory Work: Making Another’s Past Your Own

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Probes, Social Memory

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From a larger piece written one Saturday last October:

I realized earlier this morning that I’ve been contemplating memory for ten years now. I realized this earlier this morning as I was looking at a photograph on a shelf across from me, a picture of Gil [my fiancée’s deceased husband] holding their infant daughter, a photo which must have been taken close to 12 years ago. While I’m often saddened by the fact that he never got to watch his daughter grow up, and that she has grown up never knowing him, I’m also comforted by this photo. Taken after he was diagnosed with cancer, he is clearly happy and he is with his daughter. It’s a picture of family, of a family, and a picture of my family. This photo represents a past that has become as much a part of me as my own.

In the ten years I’ve been contemplating memoria, I’ve never had any intention of dealing with memoir, of life writing, as that’s the one aspect of memory and writing that has been and continues to be well explored. However, this past year I’ve found myself confronted with a central tenet of social memory studies, a subject of much interest to me, which is the belief that all memory is social, that even our personal memories are filtered through and remembered within the framework of social experience.

While I never knew him, I have had to struggle with integrating into my own experience memories of a man who died in January 2000. With both of Lisa’s parents dead before her daughter was born, Gil’s parents became Lisa’s parents, and they and the rest of his family and his friends have readily embraced me into their family. The home of his childhood—not the house, but the area and the family cabin—places that have been dear to Lisa for 20 years, are becoming dear to me. I now live in the house that he and Lisa bought to raise their child in, which is also the house in which he died. Even if Lisa weren’t working on a memoir of the experience of giving birth to a daughter and then losing a husband to cancer, all within 13 months time, I could not escape his presence, his memory, if I’d wanted to. Integrating that past, his presence, with my own past and my own experience is memory work. And so I now find myself contemplating memoir as a practice of memory.

As I’ve hinted at from time to time, I spent a good chunk of the last decade severely depressed. Even situational depression, left untreated and allowed to grow, can be devastating, and by the time I was free of the root causes, I’d lost my sense of self, was left with a deep self-loathing, and had picked up some serious anxieties. Writing, particularly scholarly writing, became a casuality and attempts at writing, at doing scholarship, regularly resulted in panic attacks followed by jags of self-loathing for being a failure at what I so much wanted to do.

I’m still picking up a piece of myself here and there, still trying to finally put to rest the anxieties and self-doubt that threaten to once again become self-loathing, but I’m mostly fine and have been for over a year. I mention this, I think, because I’ve been in the long process of reclaiming myself since the end of 2008, and everything was still a bit new when I found myself not only reframing my life to accommodate my relationship with Lisa and her 12-year old daughter, but also in working through the presence of Gil. My own scar tissue hadn’t completely healed before I directly confronted the trauma of a young death and its aftermath on the life of the woman I love.

I’ll readily admit that this presence I feel is largely of my own construction, and things like the few photographs of him in common rooms of the house such as those in the living room remain where they are because I requested that they not be put away or moved to Miss Mo’s room. It is more complicated than that, though, as Lisa is herself working on a memoir of that experience, and it is in large part the intellectual work that we each do and the sharing of that work which drew us together. I can’t imagine not listening as she talks ideas and memories through, or not reading and commenting on early drafts, or not talking about the theory and practice of remembering and writing.

It is, however, a hard thing to read about that pain and loss. While I don’t need to reach out and comfort the woman I am with—she’s had enough time to make peace with her past—I feel an intense need to reach out and comfort the woman she was 12 years ago, a woman I wouldn’t even know for another 6 years. It hurts because the pain she feels and the comforting she needs are real but at the same time she herself does not exist, and so while I feel her pain, I am not allowed the solace we feel when we provide comfort to those we love. Even though I do all this by choice, all of this confronting and integrating of a past that is not mine in a way that allows me to place it within framework that I can understand, this is hard work.

And in working through all this I have had driven home to me that this is memory work. The integrating of the lives of others into our own life is memory work regardless of whether or not we realize it as such, and the closer and stronger the relationship, the harder the work to be done. Whether or not we give this work a tangible form for others to read or see or listen to, to do this work is to recompose oneself and one’s relationship with the world and the past, and that is the work of memoir. While up until now I’ve not had any real interest in thinking about memoir as part of my work on memoria, in working through all this and in falling in love with a woman who is writing a memoir about the experience of having a daughter and losing a husband to cancer in the space of 13 months, I can’t help but start thinking about memoir as a practice of memory.

All of this serves as preface for this: Back in August, I started using 750words.com. I’ve not used it consistently like I’ve been meaning to—in fact, I’ve only used it 4 times—but one interesting feature  I’ve found is that will generate a series of reports and a word cloud based upon what you’ve written. Not knowing exactly what I was going to write today other than that I wanted to riff off the piece I wrote last October, I opened up 750words and wrote. What emerged is the start of an attempt to work out the complex idea of integrating the memories of others into your own—of my personal experience of how, as Maurice Halbwachs argues, all memory is social—and an argument with Barthes on the relationship of photographs to memory. Since I really wasn’t sure where I was going, I’m finding fascinating the data 750words pulled to create a report which consists of both a word cloud and of charts on, among other things, what I was feeling, what I was concerned about, what I focused on, and what my mindset was. Go ahead and take a look.

A Brief Introductory History to Embodied Cognition

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Memory

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A placeholder post to “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain,” a Scientific American guest blog post by Samuel McNerney. A direct challenge to Cartisean dualism, embodied cognition argues that not only shouldn’t we believe in a mind/body split, the way we think is structured by the fact that we exist within bodies and is metaphorical in nature. Or, as McNerney explains:

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”

The post is based upon an interview with George Lakoff, one of the founders of embodied cognition.

There’s nothing new here, at least to me, but I’m sharing this for those who aren’t familiar with embodied cognition and for me to make us of later. As I’ve mentioned many times here on Machina Memorialis, such as in”Conceptual Blending and Metaphor,” embodied cognition and its concepts such as conceptual blending are intimately tied to practices of memoria, the least of not which being the places and images mnemonic of memory palaces and other forms of architectural mnemonics.

Memory and Spacial Boundries

03 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Memory

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From Research Digest: Blogging on Brain and Behavior:

A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that’s just been left behind. [Read more.]1

 

  1. Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645 [↩]

Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 2

02 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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[Note: You may find this post less confusing if you first read “Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 1.” Among other things, I explain the difference between author Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the novel) and character Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the handbook).]1

From the handbook’s entry on the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, which is the means by which people in Minor Universe 31 travel through time:

One notable quirk of the word recreational in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.

This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.

Memory and imagination, recreation and creation, both seem to be intimately tied. Consider, for instance, these three passages, the first two from Mary Carruthers The Craft of Thought (( The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. )) :

The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Craft of Thought 3)

and

Medieval memoria thus includes, in our terms, “creative thought,” but not thoughts created “out of nothing.” It built upon remembered structures “located” in one’s mind as patters, edifices, grids, and — most basically — association-fabricated networks of “bits” in one’s memory that must be “gathered” into an idea.  (Craft of Thought 23)

and the third from Mark Johnson’s “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition”2 :

According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. (79)

All of this is quite interesting in light of research which finds that scene construction is a shared process common to both episodic memory and the creation of fictional experiences as reported by Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, and Eleanor A. Maguire in “Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory”3:

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. […]. By using previously imagined fictitious experiences as a comparison for episodic memories, we identified the neural basis of a key process engaged in common, namely scene construction, involving the generation, maintenance and visualization of complex spatial contexts. […]. We conclude that scene construction constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory and imagination of fictitious experiences, and suggest it may partially account for the similar brain networks implicated in navigation, episodic future thinking, and the default mode.  [Read full abstract.]

All of this seems to suggest that the active creation of one’s own mnemonic images is an important mnemonic practice, something we’ve already known. In other words, this is really just a post connecting contemporary cognitive research to long-established mnemonic practices.

  1. Note: The first quote of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks in draft form. At one point, I thought I had something to say about it, but I only have the vaguest notion of what it might have been. As that’s the case, I’m releasing this to the wild, juxtaposed with a few additional quotes in the hopes that something will eventually emerge. [↩]
  2.  Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86  [↩]
  3. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26 December 2007, 27(52): 14365-14374 [↩]

Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 1

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Memory, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense. — Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu’s novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is about a Charles Yu, a time travel technician who lives in Minor Universe 31. In the novel, the character Charles Yu writes the fictional book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which is part time travel technical manual, part autobiography. Excerpts from the fictional How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe are scattered throughout the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In this post, I’ll refer to the fictional book the character Charles Yu writes as “the handbook” and the novel as the “novel.”1

The above quote, one such passage from the handbook, strikes a chord. Looking beyond the conceit that a book can itself a time machine, I’m struck by the claim that it takes memory and regret to produce time travel as this suggests that the recollection of contentedness and regret, positive and negative experience, are manifestly different in kind. If recollection is always remembering past experience, why would the recollection of unhappy memories, recollection of moments of regret, be a form of time travel while the recollection of positive experiences—happy memories—not be so? It may be that while the recollection of positive events, like social memory, has to do with identity and sense of self and, therefore, present-focused, regret, like trauma, is past-focused, a past moment that seeks to draw you back into your past.

Still trying to puzzle out what, if anything, this might mean from the perspective of memoria beyond the obvious connection to the rhetorical use of pathos.

  1.  As a side note, in the process of composing this post, I found it refreshing to read Ander Monson’s NYTbook review of the novel, “Living in Your Head,” because it is a NYT review of a science fiction novel that doesn’t feel the need to apologize for reviewing a science fiction novel. Sadly, I suspect this has much more to do with the fact that Charles Yu is an award-winning author of literary fiction who has chosen to write a science fiction novel rather than because the NYT has come to terms with science fiction. I’m reminded here of Tom Shippey’s argument in his Forward to J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century that science fiction and fantasy are mainstream and everything else is genre. [↩]

Memory and the Digital

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Memory

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Summary of some studies on the internet’s affects on memory:

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder. [Read more.]