Weird Thing, Memory
Memories will never leave you alone. That is a fact. They may in the cases of amnesia or Alzheimer's disease be false or corrupted memories, but they will never truly leave. In both of those conditions there is an inability to recall but also a knowledge that something is missing - which is in itself a memory. At this point I must say that I'm not talking about final phase Alzheimer's, which is as complete and horrific as any final phase disease can be.
What I'm talking about is the random transience of memory. How is it that you can use a toaster for a week with no ill effects and then on the eighth day remember precisely how someone used to put a muffin in a different toaster several years ago?! There seems to be no rationale to the trigger-mechanism. It could be a flavour, a frisbee, a festival, a family, a fight, or a fright... an animal, a vegetable or a mineral. After traumatic times you could look, for the very first time,
at an image from an electron microscope of a fungal spore and be reminded of someone purely because they had once suffered with athlete's foot. At such times you could literally open a dictionary and create a connection from any word you know to those persons uppermost in your thoughts. Sadly though, the words you don't know make you think: "I bet they didn't know that either". It's a no-win situation. Why this happens, I don't know. It's true that things calm down in time but they can never be trusted to leave completely. The likelihood is that you will have 'given them their coat' but they are still hiding with it in the cupboard.
Memories run the entire gamut of our emotions - I guess that's what makes them memories. For every human emotion we each have ever experienced there is a 'flag' memory that will forever mark its place. There could be a memory that makes you feel wonderfully warm after dropping the evening's meal on the kitchen floor just because you once laughed about it with someone rather than cried. Or it might be a moment at night when you suddenly re-remember something that you're really not proud of, give out an involuntary expletive, and curl into the foetal position.
I just don't know. Maybe someday I'll remember what prompted me to write this.
What I'm talking about is the random transience of memory. How is it that you can use a toaster for a week with no ill effects and then on the eighth day remember precisely how someone used to put a muffin in a different toaster several years ago?! There seems to be no rationale to the trigger-mechanism. It could be a flavour, a frisbee, a festival, a family, a fight, or a fright... an animal, a vegetable or a mineral. After traumatic times you could look, for the very first time,
at an image from an electron microscope of a fungal spore and be reminded of someone purely because they had once suffered with athlete's foot. At such times you could literally open a dictionary and create a connection from any word you know to those persons uppermost in your thoughts. Sadly though, the words you don't know make you think: "I bet they didn't know that either". It's a no-win situation. Why this happens, I don't know. It's true that things calm down in time but they can never be trusted to leave completely. The likelihood is that you will have 'given them their coat' but they are still hiding with it in the cupboard.Memories run the entire gamut of our emotions - I guess that's what makes them memories. For every human emotion we each have ever experienced there is a 'flag' memory that will forever mark its place. There could be a memory that makes you feel wonderfully warm after dropping the evening's meal on the kitchen floor just because you once laughed about it with someone rather than cried. Or it might be a moment at night when you suddenly re-remember something that you're really not proud of, give out an involuntary expletive, and curl into the foetal position.
I just don't know. Maybe someday I'll remember what prompted me to write this.
posted by fwyalchen at 9:16 PM
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