Memory
—What is memory? William asked the elders. — «It is something that we can remember, said one; — It’s kind of lukewarm, answered another. —Something very old and that makes you cry. — something that makes you laugh. — something precious like gold», — they answered little by little. In this story, written by Men Fox, a boy named William is the protagonist. He wants to find an explanation for Ann’s health condition. Her best friend; a 96-year-old woman, who had lost her memory and could no longer remember him.
Mnemosyne, daughter of Gaia and Uranus and mother of the nine muses, was, for the ancient Greeks, the goddess of memory. Remembering the deeds of the great heroes was a task proper to poets. The poets preserved the memory of rulers and peoples.
Paul Ricoer, in his work Memory, History and Oblivion, states that two concepts related to memory are evident in the ancient Greek world. The first is mneme, which refers to memory as something that appears. The second is anamnesis, which designates the memory as the object of the search of someone who wants to remember. In this sense we speak of remembrance.
There is an individual memory, but there is also historical memory. Nations have policies that establish what things to remember, commemorate and even forget. Building and destroying memory is a constant activity. Cultures have parameters to choose, defend and preserve certain events. Also, to marginalize and silence fragments of memory.
But, leaving behind the politics of memory, it is worth emphasizing that remembering becomes a way of repairing. Memory, in Ricoeur’s words, “is an image that shows itself as the presence of an absent thing marked by the past.” Despite being an image of the past, it has an emotional charge that can be positive or negative and can affect those who experienced certain events.
We remember our experiences. Experience implies the immediate presence of something before consciousness. For example: I am at home writing this reflection. Around me there are multiple objects: books, furniture, utensils… These objects are not present to me for the simple fact of coinciding in the same physical space. They are present because I am aware of them, they are even there because they are significant to me.
The idea of meaning connects us with the concept of experience. We not only perceive things or events, but also feel something in their presence. Emotions go with the experience. In this sense, human beings combine the experiences that belong to the order of knowledge with emotions. We are senti-thinking beings. Now, what does this have to do with memory? Emotions help memory. On many occasions, what sticks most in memory is the feeling that an experienced reality produced. Thus, when we speak of experiences, we refer to events that have left a deep mark on us.
The experiences are in line with our episodic memory — a first type of memory. Most of our memories correspond to episodes of life. In the episodes there is always a where (place), a when (time), some people, a situation and some emotions. The people we love are part of a chain of significant memories that are connected to us by a story, by a past. There is also a semantic memory, that is, a memory related to concepts. There is no where or when here — as in episodic memory — but there is a what. For example, we cannot remember when we learned to say shirt, table, city or dog, but we manage to unite the concepts with what they designate.
Procedural memory — third type of memory — has to do with experience. With everything that is within the framework of praxis: habits and procedures. Such as riding a bicycle, swimming, driving, among other things. All we know how to do. And, finally, we can speak of a fourth type, which would be working memory. Short-term memory, which corresponds to what you forget easily: a phone number, a message, a date for an engagement, etc.
Deep down, we are what we can remember, and every time we evoke a memory, we reconstruct it anew. In this sense we can say that memory is a creative act because every time we remember we add new information.
Do you remember William, the boy who was very worried because Ann — his 96-year-old friend— couldn’t remember him, since she had lost her memory? He did not give up! He realized that memory was linked to objects and places that can help us evoke memories. So he decided to gather objects that could help Ann evoke memories of her. He collected seashells, so that she would remember the sea. Some puppets, so that she could remember happy moments. He collected a medal that belonged to a brother she lost in the war. And, of course, a soccer ball, for her to remember the moment they met. Everything worked out in the end: Ann managed to remember William.
Our personal identity is linked to memory. What we think, say and do is linked to it. An example is found in rituals. We generate a connection between ritual and memory when one year ends and another begins. When we have a birthday or celebrate a marriage anniversary. When religious people (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, etc.) celebrate their annual festivals. All the experiences we live are connected. The ritual is the basis of the party. It is what makes one day different from the others.
I remember a dialogue between The Little Prince and the fox –present in the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry–. Where the little prince asks the fox: what is a rite?, to which the fox replies:
It is something very forgotten, it is what makes some days different from other days, one hour different from other hours. Among my hunters there is a ritual, on Thursdays they go to dance with the girls of the town, and then, Thursday is a wonderful day! I’m going to walk to the vineyard. If the hunters danced on any given day, the days would all be the same and I would have no rest.
Remembering allows us to celebrate. And in the case of rituals, they not only help us to rest, but also allow others to rest — like the fox when the hunters went out to dance. Memory does not only refer to the traces and ruins that have remained as testimonies of a past lived by us or by others. It is also linked to our individual identity. We could say that we are what we remember. As Gabriel García Márquez put it in Living to tell the story: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it to tell it.”
