What are Memories?

By Madeleine Kando

The word for ‘memory’ in old English is ‘murnan’, which means ‘to mourn or remember sorrowfully’. You recognize that meaning in the Dutch words ‘mijmeren’ or ‘peinzen’, which means ‘to ponder, muse or dream’.

To have memories always has a tinge of deep, regretfulness, whether we are talking about positive or negative memories. They are sorrowful because they represent moments that no longer exist. On the other hand, we wouldn’t be who we are without our memories. Memories define us. Like strands of spaghetti, memories make us reach into the past and into our future. It is only because we have memories that we can ‘imagine’ our future self.

As I write this, I have memories of the three weeks I just spent in Kauai. They are wonderful, but also sorrowful. I dream of still being there. The older these memories are, the more they approach the pining stage. Six months from now, when Boston is buried under five feet of snow and it is too cold to even take my dog out to pee, I will pine and sorrowfully muse about Kauai. I won’t pine for the centipede that one morning decided to share my shower cell and whose bite feels like you have just been shot. I won’t dream of the monster wave that knocked me down to the sandy bottom and almost crashed open my skull. Those details will be conveniently forgotten.

When I was on Kauai, there was no room for memories because the present was so overwhelming: Hiking in the jungle, snorkeling and watching the stunningly beautiful Napali Coast. You cannot have memories of something that is happening in the present.

Kauai itself has a five million year old memory, stored in its red soil and lush vegetation. If a Kauaian could live that long she would have witnessed two billion sunsets, give or take. Do islands have memories? Or is it the privileged domain of sentient beings?

Most of us who go there to partake in this sensory orgy, want desperately to hold on to a fleeting experience by taking hundreds of photos of those sunsets. The original inhabitants more than likely watched the sunset after a hard day’s work tilling their taro fields. They didn’t watch it through their iPhone. Does the frenzied desire to hold on to the present by taking pictures of a sunset prevent us from experiencing it?

My parents were both professional photographers. They taught me a thing or two about viewing the world through a lens. Our ‘family albums’ do not sit on a bookshelf gathering dust, they ARE our family. My twin sister is not this grey haired woman that I Skype with on a regular basis. She is the chubby baby that I shared a crib with. She is the gorgeous 16 year old blond who stole all my boyfriends. She is the 21 year old ballet dancer posing for a perfect arabesque. Our entire lives were recorded, minute by minute, not because of our memories but because of the lens that both my parents focused on us, their children.

But you don’t need to be a professional these days to immortalize your life’s memories. We all feel this tug of war between our need to share our memories and memories’ inherent desire to remain private. They are supposed to die when you die. Don’t they reside in our brain? True memories are personal, intimate. Why? Because they are yours, no one else’s. A photo you post on Facebook becomes everyone’s memory. It loses it’s memoriness. It’s just a fake copy of a memory. The ‘friends’ that see that memory make it their own. It is not longer yours.

There are memories that one would rather not have. Those are so painful that they only appear in nightmares. It is the strength of our species that we cope with memories that otherwise would destroy us. If memories would force us to relive those nightmarish moments, we would not survive them. The present can break us, but we are masters of our memories.

Sometimes I fantasize about having no memory of the day before. I wake up, look at the sunlight through the bedroom curtains and I am full of wonder. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? I am new, not a copy of what I was yesterday. I don’t want to sound factitious. I know loss of memory is a devastating condition. But isn’t that what we do when we read fiction, watch movies and even imagine what it would be like to be a famous person? We try to become a person we were not before.

But the moment I return to my ‘real life’, I see my wrinkled hands type these words, I feel the stiffness in my back, I hear the rain pelt against my window. I cannot wait till the moment my brain has had time to wash the present clean of its sting and morph it into a laundered memory.

The only problem with that, is that since I am not a famous photographer whose memories are immortalized, no matter how clean washed my present will be, it will disappear the moment I disappear. Oh well, it’s probably for the best. Can you imagine if everybody’s memories would survive them? It would clog the airways, cause incredible memory traffic jams - one person’s memories would collide with another person’s memory at a traffic circle and they would not know where to go! It would cause a global memory epidemic!

That’s what’s happening on Facebook. We are confusing the real world with what happened in the past. Now, I pine for those sunsets that I didn’t ruin by watching them through my iPhone. I prevented the memory of that one memorable sunset to plant itself into my long-term memory, by trying to focus, get the right angle, etc.

Then, we share those memories with our friends on Facebook, pretending they are real memories. The next time you share a photo of a sunset on Facebook, add a caption: ‘warning this is a pretend sunset. To see the real thing, close your eyes and imagine one.’ leave comment here