The Mists of Memory

How's your memory?  Cluttered?  Neatly organised and cross-referenced?  More or less absent?

Do you know how your memory works?  Are you one of those people who digs and searches in vain, only to have the answer appear sometime during the early hours of the next morning?  Or, are you one of those who have constructed an elaborate "palace of memory" that allows you to locate and examine a vast array of carefully stored facts and figures?

How do they do it?  My grandmother seemed able, whenever recounting even the most minor of incidents, and without losing the thread of the story, to digress into the relationships, address, employment status, character flaws, and personal life of each new character as they entered the story - taking twenty minutes to relate an event that my grandfather would have told in two.

My mother in law has a similar skill, and is able to apply it to stories dating back almost eight decades.  My father had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, and the histories, addresses, and vehicles associated therewith - a handy skill in his case, as he spent decades as a police detective.  It was nothing for him to recite from memory - accurately - the contents of a thirty page statement of evidence.
 
I have several friends who have the ability to remember not only the names of everyone in their extended families, but most or all of the people with whom they worked, or went to school, church, and university with.  If that were not bad enough, they also seem able to remember their birthdays and marital status, as well as the names and birthdays of their children and grandchildren, and the birthdays of all the spouses of the people they know.

I have enough trouble remembering the names of all the grandkids in my family, let alone their birthdays, and as for the spouses or partners of children and step-children and siblings, well, for that I would need to do some sort of undergraduate course.  There are other things - facts, figures, events, scientific equations, and all sorts of interesting incidents of both dramatic and humorous nature - that have stuck; don't ask me why, I really don't know.

Moments of great embarrassment dating back to my first decade of life seem to have clung to existence in my memory banks, no matter how much I wish they would just fade away.  And, of course, the moments of crisis - fire, flood, disaster - all lurk to trip me up at unexpected moments.

And yet, on one occasion recently, I decided to draw up a list of people I had known when I lived in The Valley (as its residents call it) during a period between forty and twenty years ago. I had been thinking about doing a small essay on an aspect of the history of the place, but could only recall a few faces, and fewer names.

Once I began typing, each name called up others that would otherwise have escaped memory, and before I knew it, ten pages of two line entries - a name, and the reason I knew them - had been filled.  Many of those names were ones I would not have been able to reach directly, if someone had asked me "Who was that person that........?" but associations helped build a web of relationships and stories.  Memory - truly strange.

Remembering and forgetting are such crucial aspects of not only our daily lives, but of our development from childhood, onwards, and of vital importance to our education system, medical science, and politics, and yet we do not have anywhere near a complete understanding as to how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved.  As a field of science, memory is one of constant conflict and debate, as is the field of consciousness, with which is it is so closely intertwined.

We do know that there are all sorts of triggers that can invoke memory at unexpected moments - scents, sights, sounds, music, emotions - and those invocations can be wonderful, or poignant, or traumatic.

As writers, we rely on our memory to hand us a flow of interesting words, facts, scenarios, and emotions that we can use to create our stories.  It's a wonderful feeling when the pen is gliding across the page, racing to keep up with the flow of interesting words that have bubbled up to the level of consciousness.  One idea leads on to the next, and another, and before you know it, a story has spread from the top of the first page to halfway down the twentieth.  People, places and incidents you might otherwise have struggled to recall have galloped back into view, vying for a place - even if disguised - in your latest literary effort.

And then there are your characters - what sort of memory do they have?  Sharp and detailed? Fading?  Or even that sad patchiness of recall that can come with the onset of dementia?  Is their memory accurate?  Are they telling the reader, or the detective, or their spouse, or their children, the truth?  Do they believe it to be the truth, or do they understand that they are playing someone false? Have they even created false memories for themselves, in denial of painful reality?  How does their memory compare to that of the other characters, or to the facts known to the omniscient narrator?  Such disparities can trip a writer very badly, or be intentionally used to keep the reader guessing right up to a final, satisfying ending.

In short - no matter how good you think your memory is or isn't, and no matter how low an opinion you may have of your writing skills, it is all in there, somewhere, waiting for the opportunity to dance across the stage of memory or the page of creativity.  It will have that opportunity if you only start writing or typing. Go for it - you will surprise yourself.

Group Marathons

Daily life provides me with so much to write about, while giving me lots of reasons to procrastinate about writing.  Writing group, for a couple of hours, puts me in the company of people with a common purpose – to get something onto paper.  It is only once a month, and yet, if the other demands of life have distracted me too much, going to that quiet space at the library with other like-minded people helps me reset my priorites and get back on the writing track.

Katoomba Library kindly allows us the use of a study space – our group is one of the results of a public meeting organised a couple of years ago by the librarians.  One of those librarians collates and publishes some of our efforts in the Writers in theMist blog, on Blue Mountains Library's website and this has led to some of us launching our own blogs and seeking out other places to publish.

People drift in and out of the group, though a core has continued on – there is no constitution or committee, nor any fees, or rules, other than an acceptance of the principle that we are there to create, and to foster creativity in each other.  Sounds serious?  Sometimes it is – some works bring tears, and many bring laughter.  We pick on grammar and spelling, suggest alternative plot lines, and generally get lost in the joy of creative writing.  It is serious, and it is fun – and I wish I had taken my solitary habit out into company much sooner than I did.

We recently had a writing "marathon" day – bringing a plate of food to contribute to lunch, we gathered at the house of one of the group.  The house had the light and airy feel of a place by a beach in much warmer climes - it was the only sunny day in an otherwise rain-drenched month - and we sat down to the long table to write while looking down a wooded gully towards the vast expanse of rugged country that enfolds Sydney's main water supply.

The writing alternated between sessions of working in a group to various prompts, and working on a piece of our own, each in our own corner of a veranda or a sunny part of the gardens.  It is amazing how productive you can be when all the demands of daily life and all the opportunities to procrastinate have been swept away by the commitment to a writing day.

Our first prompt based session took a different approach to anything I had experienced – we wrote while music was playing.  Three pieces – Norwegian, Scottish, and Irish – stimulated some interesting and varied written responses.  I love music, and often have it on in the background while writing, but this was a particularly vivid and poignant selection designed to evoke deep feelings.

It is one thing to contemplate a phrase, or some word, object, or picture, that has been placed in the middle of the table by the moderator for a particular group session – you have time to rack your memory, mentally pick up, examine, or discard, any associations such words or objects produce – and another thing entirely to respond in writing to music while it is playing.  The response is visceral and immediate, swept along by the changing tone and tempo of the piece.   Music, like scent, can reach deep inside mind and memory to conjure images we didn't know were present, or had long forgotten.

What an amazing cascade of memory and association is often produced by the initial evocation – as the first image is drawn out of our mind, through pen onto the paper, it in turn wakes more memories and calls forth more stories – stories we have not thought of for years, or even decades. 

Working on an essay about the history of the Bush Fire Brigade I had spent twenty years with, I decided to jot down the names of a few people I might have to interview or otherwise include in the story. Each would have a few lines summing up who they were and what their part in that history was.

What should have been a page or two became half a notepad, as one name and its story called up other forgotten names, and their stories.  These were names I had not been able to remember previously, but the act of writing part of the story of that group opened the memory files of so many more people and stories, just as unexpected sights, sounds, smells, familiar faces or old movies, can also be windows into the vast storehouse that lurks within our little halls of bone and brain.

One day, perhaps, we will truly understand the human mind – how it collects and stores memories, and how we recall those memories – but, until we do, any talk of uploading ourselves into machine storage and living "immortally" in such a state is quite fanciful.  Which doesn't mean a good SciFi writer can't imagine what such a state might be like.  Anything is possible to a writer - even the impossible.