Memory

Rewatching Memento (great movie, highly recommend to anyone that has not seen it yet) I came to think about the concept of memory and how it affects our life as we know it. Out of the many memorable lines in the movie, the one that pertained the most to memory in relation to our livelihood was: “So how… how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t… feel time?”

Our short term memory is what makes an experience visceral and well…memorable. An event is memorable to us when we develop emotional ties to it. How do we develop these emotional ties? By attaching emotional content to the little details of the event. Thus it is the little details which you remember which makes things significant. Certain smells which reminds you of the comfort of home or an apprehensive place. Certain objects or scenes which we associate with an uncle’s or aunts place or certain places you have traveled to. The drip of a faucet, the laughter of a child, the fragments of a conversation. This is especially true with childhood memories where all that remains are shells of a memory. As Leonard puts its evocatively in memento, “You can just feel the details. The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words. And you can feel these extreme moments… even if you don’t want to.”

If this defines our memory, then our feeling and concept of time is simply a string of these emotional attachments over a set duration. Taking this concept of memory and its relation to time, it answers Leonard’s question quite succinctly: you can’t. Without out these memories, you can’t feel time. Without feeling time, how can you heal? How can you heal if the last memory you had was of a traumatic event. How can you develop distance from that event if is the last thing you remember every time you wake up? It’s hard. As Leonard eloquently sums it up, “If we can’t make memories, we can’t heal.” In essence these visceral memories is what we remember. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

People really do take the memory and the ability to create new memory for granted. It plays such an integral role in our life and our defense mechanism yet we easily dismiss of it. As cliche as it sounds, we really don’t learn to appreciate it until we have lost it.

The visceral details

Photo taken in Hong Kong Summer 2009