OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Distortion

November 15th, 2008

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened. (Amy Bloom) via the unreliable narrator

I go to leave a comment and it mushrooms, explodes, this is all wrong, memory, I was going to claim, was the story we tell ourselves. Or maybe that is only what memory becomes, having had a moment when it was experienced like a replay and then encased it in words, words which bear the same resemblance to the experience that a tiny green square on a map does to a landscape filled with cows and a piling up of clouds on the horizon and buzzing and ticking insects and the smell of cut grass and the squelch of mud around boots and gathering heat so you feel a dribble of sweat trace down your chest.

I have the tape recorder that plays back conversations in my head, and I think there are distortions, I wear the tape thin on the thing I said that might have hurt, might have sounded stupid, been misconstrued. I tell myself that neither the worst nor the best of what I think of myself could be true. I work so hard to compensate for my own distortions, I am overwhelmed imagining the distortions of other people with their own rememberings.

Map and memory have similar distortions, will both pretend to be objective, but betray a point of view. I like thinking about the map my cat would make of our neighborhood, how she recognizes different boundaries than we do, I remember when the house next door was empty and a neighbor called because she saw her go in there. A cat’s map wouldn’t represent the road as possibility and destination and the siren call of away or even the convenient way to get there, it would be barrenness and death and obstacle.

We carry the map so past experience can help us navigate the future. We don’t think so much about the usefulness of memory when it is about experience dehydrated, folded small so you can carry it around with you, but you try to remember the things you are going to need.

I know this isn’t Ms. Bloom’s point. She says more about whether shame gives memory unspeakable shadows. (As I write this one son comes crying that a brother has said something mean, I ask the brother who gives an entirely different version of the story. I cock an eyebrow, or, no, I am not cool enough to actually cock an eyebrow — perhaps I lower my head and look over the top of my glasses, get a more complete version which should shame the unkind child. I don’t punch him.)
But the editing and the truth and the further distortion and fading of time. Thinking about the idea of voices in my head, I wonder if I think in words have non-verbal thinking, do I remember in words? Maybe that’s why the random encounter with a long-lost smell or angle of light or sensation of something I thought was lost seems like a gift, giving me access to memories not yet converted into tellings.

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