I have a terrible memory. When I actually stop to think back on my life, to specific moments or sequences of time and events, I often draw a blank. Or if not a blank then a whole bunch of fuzzy blotches punctuated by non sequential images or impressions that may or may not be accurate.
You know that thing I wrote in my bio, about doing all this writing because after X number of years it gets hard to remember where I’ve been? Ā That wasn’t a throwaway comment. I really can’t remember. It’s like I have early onset Alzheimers or something.
There was a throwaway comment in Bill Bryson’s book, The Lost Continent,Ā where he says something to the effect that when his father died, he had been taken by surprise to find that a part of himself had gone with him. All of the memories his father had held were lost. Memories of his childhood. Memories of people and places and events they had known together. Ā Those memories made up part of who he was, part of a very complicated puzzle of identity. He wasn’t just himself alone but rather a collection of other people’s memories. When his dad died, he took a chunk of that with him.
When I first read that book, I was in my early 20s and hadn’t spent all that much time away from home. I was still a part of the collective memory of Vancouver Island, of my rather large extended family, of things I’d known for a long time. Ā I don’t think that line even registered with me. I felt rooted, secure. Everything and everyone was still around me to tell me who I was and where I’d come from.
I reread it recently and it resonated. Not that anyone died recently, no. But I started thinking about how much self, how much memory is held outside the body, in other people, in places, in contexts. When you grow up, you make associations with sounds and smells and tastes and when you meet them again, your memory is jogged. When you know people a long time, you are continually reminding each other of where you’ve been, who you have been, what you have done.
I’ve been travelling a lot for the past couple of decades. New places every year, people coming and going– mostly going. My memories are spread waaaaaaaaay out in so many directions. I have no idea where half those people or places are.
I think I was once in Cairo but I can’t be certain. I did write it down so it must be true.
This morning I discovered that our hotel had face cloths in the bathroom. Facecloths. I hadn’t seen or used a face cloth in years. I squirted some of the lovely lavender bath gel onto it and gave my face a good scrub. And with that I remembered the feeling of the facecloths I had used as a kid growing up in the forest, of the wood frame around our bath tub, of the little window that looked out at the forest at shoulder height. Ā I remembered chainsaws and howling dogs, gravel roads, trails I cleared in the forest, drawers where certain Archie comics were kept. All those things I had pretty much forgotten about because I hadn’t been anywhere near a face cloth to jog the memory.
There are a lot of other cues and contexts that I haven’t had much of in a long time, things that would keep and build my memory: family, colleagues, friends that stick around longer than a year or two, landmarks, tchotchkes, certain foods, certain sounds, certain smells.
There was a time, a long time ago, when I suddenly found myself in a cafe somewhere in Amsterdam late at night, completely and rather frighteningly decontextualized. I realized I had no idea how I’d got there, where I was meant to go or who I was. That moment passed eventually (space cakes don’t stay in the system forever) but the memory of, well, total memory loss, total decontextualization, stuck with me. Ā Every so often a similar though less intense feeling hits me when I’m traveling (or when I’m in Shanghai, but tired). Ā Nothing around me is capable of reminding me of any of my previous incarnations.
I’m pretty sure I was here, because I have photographic evidence.
And so there’s the idea of writing to hold onto those memories when you are away from home, unrooted. I write a lot to tether myself to something. But I’m not to be trusted. I exaggerate. I minimize. I edit. I don’t say things that might hurt people. I don’t talk about people who hurt me. I avoid certain issues. I try to convince myself that things are far better or far worse than they really are. Ā I make shit up. I once sent home a series of now famed mass emails, detailing the glittering wonders of London at Christmas, with the lights of Oxford street and the loveliness of the decorations and the parties. Not one word in those exuberant emails let on the fact that I was in the middle of a rather horrific break up with my then boyfriend and had spent many days curled up on the floor of phone booths around the city, crying and waiting for it to be morning in Canada so I could call home and be comforted. I cannot be trusted to record my own memory.
My memory, it seems, is made up almost entirely of hyperbole and omission.
For those of you who travel a lot, do you feel anything similar? Or is it just me?
More from the Context series:
Age and the Decontextualization of Travel
Identity and DecontextualizationĀ
28 Responses
This post reminds me of this article I just read http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/what-happens-when-data-disappears.html It’s a bit different, but there’s a theme of memory loss and the lengths we go to keep our memories around in some way. I definitely have felt many of the things you describe here, especially since I’ve just done soooo much, I’ve seen so many things, etc, that it’s impossible to keep the special memories close without documenting them in some way.
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I think it does have something to do with changing places and contexts and companioship repeatedly as you emerge with a seemingly disjointed string of very different versions of yourself that don’t have much to do with each other and have no way to reinforce memories from previous incarnations. To be honest I sometimes wonder why I value memory so much. Is it so important?
[…] – Notes on Memory and Context (and the Decontextualization of Travel) (Mary Anne Oxendale) I once sent home a series of now famed mass emails, detailing the glittering wonders of London at Christmas, with the lights of Oxford street and the loveliness of the decorations and the parties. Not one word in those exuberant emails let on the fact that I was in the middle of a rather horrific break up with my then boyfriend and had spent many days crying my brains out. I cannot be trusted to record my own memory. […]
I like this: “My memory, it seems, is made up almost entirely of hyperbole and omission.”
I also like your face cloth bit — gravel (and walking on gravel) is something that immediately brings to mind my childhood (camping, riding my bike on paths). I love how memory can be both within us and conjured from (seemingly random) tangible objects.
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Thanks. Gravel is evocative, isn’t it? I also find the sound of chainsaws or the smell of freshly cut trees to really bring back the memories and associations.
Great post! A hundred years from now I think people will understand our era through our obsession with memory– or, not just memory, but memory preserved, archived, curated, completed, managed, externalized, verified. I sometimes feel like we’re hung between two very different relationships with the past– one in which we had to struggle to preserve fragments of what was, and one in which we are glutted with evidence of what was. We’re constantly archived, right, whether we want to be or not, on both public and private levels, in government databases and on facebook. But there’re more hours of video in the world than there are lifetimes to observe it, let alone interpret it.
Sometimes it feels like those personal/shared histories are the closest we now come to household gods, enshrined. Forgetting is a kind of heresy, now, isn’t it?
Have you ever read Pierre Nora? He’s awesome on the relationship between memory and national community, and its relationship to place. Your discussion above reminds me of his stuff, on a private level. It’s cool you’re writing it down (ironic that I enjoy your record of recordlessness… lulz!)
Just realized I never replied to your note here. Bad me. I was thinking about the archiving. So much personal archiving. I never used to archive like this. I have thousands of digital photos, most of which I have never looked at twice. I have 8 years of detailed online journaling with my LiveJournal account that I’ve never really looked at again (kind of hope they don’t delete it). I have this blog and the food blog and about a million paper pages of real diaries dating back to my very early teens (I think I started when I was 12). But like you said, more archiving than time would allow to review. So of what use it it to preserving memory?
Don’t know Pierre Nora but will look him up. I am kind of fascinated by memory in all its abstract and practical forms these days. Maybe because mine’s so fucked up.
My memory is horrible, too. I don’t know if it’s because of travel or it’s a genetic thing. My mom’s family has this tendency to forget the details (and a tendency towards Alzheimer’s… but hopefully that’s not my issue… at least not yet) and just substitutes the real facts with even better, made-up facts.
I have found that writing about stuff jogs the memory a bit. I started writing essays about my childhood this summer which was really hard seeing as I don’t remember all that much about my childhood. But while I was writing about one thing I’d remember random things that happened to me that I totally forgot. Of course, I have no idea if these are real things or made-up, imaginary things that I THINK happened to me. But, you know, I’m just starting to accept those things as my reality, too.
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No one in my family has such an appalling memory as I do. I often rely on, say, my own mother to tell me where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Embarrassing. I wish I had a genetic excuse.
To some degree I think the blurring of memory comes along naturally as we (gulp) age and accumulate experiences. Plenty of times while still living at home in the U.S., I found it had become hard to remember whose birthday we went to such-and-such place for, or which friend I met first, or who I’d had a certain conversation with, or whether some given event had happened five or seven years before. Traveling a lot probably accelerates this by increasing the number of experiences in your mental roster by a factor of x. And the collective memory of having longtime friends or family around isn’t necessarily more “true” — it’s just agreed-upon by more people.
Philosophizing aside, your story about the Christmas letter really resonated with me. I often find I’ve written a note home that’s much cheerier than I actually feel — and sometimes don’t even realize how down I am until I’ve written the note and seen how much it contrasts with what’s actually going on. I don’t want friends/family at home to worry about me, of course, but I also think I describe the life I wish I was having, the one that would make it worthwhile to be away from the people I love, leaving out the often lonely and disappointing bits…
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It’s funny you mention the age thing because I’ve found that to be getting weirder and weirder as I get older, maybe because my life has being really non linear with few of the milestones of adulthood like marriage, kids, house or real job. I still feel like I’m 24 or 30 but I’m 37 and I’m noticing that other people’s perceptions of me or expectations aren’t the same any more. Age is weird. Maybe I don’t feel older because I’ve forgotten all the years in the interim…
Fighting memory loss is akin to pushing a river back upstream.
It’s ok to accept this inevitability, gracefully………but more often than not, it irritates the crap out of most of us.
Write, photograph, re- tell often, oxygenate the brain with workout and worry less about what’s been lost, rather, concern yourself more with making new memories. After all, which will bring you more pleasure…..the kind of pleasure, that matters?
I’m working hard at keeping my brain and life from slipping into complacecy. I want to create new memories but at the same time I’m afraid of losing my past and all I’ve created up to now.
Oh, that writing stuff to make other people feel better thing. Yeah, I do that all the time. My family and I, although we all get on well and stuff, don’t really talk about stuff. We’re terribly English that way. And the same on my blog. Although most things I write are more or less truthful, I’ll hold certain things back and gloss over others.
As regards forgetting things, I’m not sure that’s to do with travelling. Or not directly, anyway. For me, it’s because I’m naturally private and so I don’t share everything with everyone around me. For travellers, it may be because they don’t have the *opportunity* to share, even if they’d like to. So the collective memory banks don’t get filled and things are forgotten until suddenly, one day, an outside force jolts you back to a certain point in time. It can be shocking, that being jerked out of present reality, but it’s usually interesting. I like it.
The private thing rings true. I write a lot in public but I realized that I don’t give all that much away. I’m very selective in what I choose to share so a lot goes unsaid and things that don’t feature so heavily in my mind get promoted to a more emphasized status simply because they were recorded and everything else wasn’t. It’s the gaps I wonder about.
I have the same identical feeling sometimes. It is scary sometimes. Parts of my past are just gone.
The gaps are disconcerting,aren’t they? I have huge chunks of my life that are stubbornly blank or blurry– even if they were recorded in journals or photos.
Omission? Yes to that one. Over the years the scope of my blog has shifted towards art rather than travel, so the personal doesn’t fit in unless it’s related to art.
The absolute decontextualization and disorientation has intensified over the years, as I’ve lost roots I once had, or any anchors to American culture. An American editor of mine caught jarring phrasing that was borderline offensive in my book — that my British husband and main editor (expat American) didn’t notice. It made me realize how much I’ve lost touch with my country’s contemporary culture.
Over the past year in particular, there have been days when I don’t know what country or city I’m in when I wake up. Whether I’m in a hotel room or in my home (then again, ‘home’ shifted several times over the past year). Or I look at my husband and forget where we are, or what we’re doing here. It could be Korea. Or Beijing, or Sydney.
This has happened in the past with friends where we’ve met up in different cities or countries, but I feel now that my recent life – for a decade but particularly the past 3 years – has been filled with places and glimpses and trying-out of homes but no commitment.
So I moved to Beijing and committed to around 3 years here. Because it scares me. Because I have to stay based in one place for a while, even if it’s not ‘home’.
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I totally relate to everything you just wrote. I think one of the reasons why I’m almost irrationally insisting on staying another year in Shanghai (even though it’s maddening and ill matched) is because I want to stand still for a while. I didn’t even do that in Turkey: 6 flats and 4 jobs in 2 cities in 6 years. My 20s were even worse. I was all over the place, frequently waking up disoriented.
Lovely writing MaryAnne, as ever. And very thought-provoking too. Memory is just so subjective too, and having parts of your memory stored elsewhere helps to confirm or refute the truthfulness of your own memories. This can be a good thing, to reclaim lost memories, or a bad thing. I always thought I was the sister who owned the pink shoes when we were little. I can see them in my mind’s eye! But apparently false. According to every other member of my family they belonged to my younger sister.
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Ha. I think in an ideal universe, you’d have had the pink shoes. Sometimes I’ve found that I stored other people’s memories rather than my own. That gets a bit complicated…
I am a happy possessor of a pretty good memory – I can recall details of trips of the past very well (only thing I can never properly remember is the years in which specific travels occured, but then again – I even managed to one time completely forget which year I was born in and had to look it up…), especially with some props (pictures :)). I would suffer a great deal if I started losing my memories en masse, so I sympathize with you…
I found that writing a journal – the good old handwritten way – even if it’s just a few lines for each day, associations, smells, colors – helps a LOT to keep the memory alive. And, of course, pictures… I have not had a digital camera for most of my trips and only got my first one roughly 3-4 years back and I already have about 23000 pictures… (now that I think of it, maybe it’s good I didn’t have a camera before it! š ).
As to whether it is important… For me – my travel memories make me who I am. They are the puzzle pieces of my personality and I cannot even begin to imagine losing them, for I would lose a huge part of myself then, too… But then again – it differs for different people :).
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I have the journal and the photos– thousands of them from the past decade since I got my first digital camera. Now I remember those isolated shots, those paragraphs, but not necessarily what came before or after or what the context was. I’m working on that…
I am kind of like an elephant. I never forget. However I really could relate to your face cloth moment. There are so many times the tiniest of details will trigger this long train of memories. I think a lot of the reasons I write about my travels is for memory. My memory might be good now, but I know that might not always be the case. Your last paragraph I think is so true. We sometimes record the time we want, not what actually occurred or how we felt in that place.
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You’re so lucky- I’ve always had to rely on friends, family, ex boyfriends, colleagues to remind me of my own memories. When, for example, I broke up with the ex I lived with for most of my 3 years in London and all my time in Cape Town, I realized he was the one with all the memories, not me. I had glimpses, hints, but he could rattle off names, dates, details. For me, it’s a fog now. Thus, all the writing…
I’ve been holding onto this post, meaning to read it for a long while. I’m glad I finally did.
Having just lost the person who I was sharing my life with, I can relate to this on so many levels. I also have a very poor memory and am shocked at how much I’ve forgotten about my life thus far. And the moment my partner died, I was shocked at all the things I immediately struggled to remember — the way we talked to each other, the way his voice sounded, the way it felt when he hugged me. It’s so true that memories seem to evaporate with the person who held them.
I am so, so grateful that I’ve been writing a blog for the last year-and-a-half. Even though, like you, I usually left out all the most difficult, personal stuff, at least I now have a framework that I can use to look back on and try to remember things that would otherwise have left the earth with Jon. And I have a place to record my grief, which I’m sure I’ll want to look back on too at some point.
Anyway, thanks for writing this post. Great topic.
Oh, wow, I’m so sorry. I must have missed the post where you mentioned it. Just found it now after sifting back through your blog. That’s hard. That’s gutting. I do understand how you feel about that sudden realization that so many memories are just gone, gone with the person who held them with you. I’m an only child and I can’t help but worry that my entire childhood will disappear when my parents go. It scares the hell out of me. Glad the post was meaningful for you. I’m working through a lot of stuff pertaining to memory and loss and fabrication these days. Not sure how much will end up published here as I keep deleting it all…like I’d said, too much hyperbole and omission. I’m starting to lose patience with myself and my tendency to create a written personal mythology that isn’t wholly true but which fits a delightful story arc or has a nice rhythm or has a brilliant pun embedded within…
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