LY #40 The Nature of Memory

Celia Keenan-Bolger and Brian J. Smith in "The Glass Menagerie"

Because so much of this blog has been and will be a "memory play," I want to tell you what I know about memory.

(By the way, the term "memory play" was coined by Tennessee Williams as a descriptor for The Glass Menagerie, currently in revival now on Broadway which, I suppose, is the reason the term came so readily to mind.  According to Dr. L. Kip Wheeler's literary terms website, a memory play "The term coined by Tennessee Williams to describe non-realistic dramas, such as The Glass Menagerie, in which the audience experiences the past as remembered by a narrator, complete with music from the period remembered, and images representing the characters' thoughts, fears, emotions, and recollections projected on a scrim in the background.")


 What I know about memory is founded on Daniel Schacter's 1996 book,  Searching for Memory:  The Brain, the Mind, and the Past.  I read it at the time I was working on a novel with a character who had a damaged memory.  I wanted to know how head injuries and trauma could impact what we remembered.  Schacter is one of the world's great experts on memory.  His book opened my eyes.  Like so many people I'd thought that the past could be recalled as it was.  I imagined holes in memory were like scratches, burns or breaks in a film reel.  But that's not the case.   Schacter's book taught me that memory isn't like technological recording.  Memories can be constructed constructed by others or altered by ourselves.

More recently, a wonderful episode of Radio Lab (from WNYC) proves that the memories that we hold most dear or most dreadful, those we review over and over again, are probably the least accurate memories we have.  These memories become like polished stones, smoother than their original shapes, with material removed.  Sometimes, they can actually have material added from other sources.

I share this with you as a warning that anything within these electronic "pages" that contains a memory is, of course, fraught with the possibility or probability that any other person sharing the same experience might not share the memory in the same form.

I'm just sayin'.