This Is Memory

I’m speculating here that I have something to say, anything to say about memory. A recent conversation centring around what would have been a remembered, shared event had come up and instead of a mutual recollection, there were yawning canyon-wide discrepancies. A leap over the chasm wasn’t one I was prepared to make. Wile E Coyote, his legs windmilling over empty space, was not sufficient assurance that it would, in the end, be survivable. Discount that history, pull it out from under. It wasn’t a supporting critical fact; it could be loosed. But the small space in the store of my memories, which I’d always thought was where I began and therefore my foundation, is rattling a little, one stone now missing from the strong retaining wall.

American writer Sallie Tisdale’s essay “Mere Belief,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 2023 and chosen for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2024 (Mariner Books, New York, Boston, 2024), is her personal investigation into the nature of memory—I think personal rather than clinical, although she does quote findings from some few studies. She lists the kinds of memory her search has given her: procedural memory (how to do things), episodic memory (when these things might be done) and semantic memory. None of this provides me with the stab in the heart of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory where he opens his memoir with “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Between these two black voids he sees the flash of memory and from this writes prose for countless millennia. Autobiographical memory, Tisdale writes—and it is here where her interests lie—is the foundation of the conscious self. She says, “I am who I am because this happened …” And I hear Gertrude Stein: “I am I because my little dog knows me,” stated with sureness and conviction a number of times over in Everybody’s Autobiography. The edition I hold was published by Exact Change, Cambridge, 1993, but first in 1937 by Random House. I am here with this because in questioning the reliability, the truthfulness of memory, I see a dematerializing self. In the repeating Trump era—do we remember an earlier one—the dematerialized self is the consequence of a world that has him bubble, scramble to the surface again, clods of earth clinging to his orange pancaked face, sticky and pulling at the roots of the orange hairs, confounded to find no originating source—a mystery that has preoccupied stylists, viewers, world leaders for over a decade. If I am I because my little dog knows me, there is certitude and I am grateful. But there is more to question on the reliability of memory, the impossibility of autobiography, certainly as a single still point. There is more to say about the present and our dematerializing unsure selves here, with no reliable true memory to call on as bolster. Instead, buffeted is what we are, and Gertrude Stein’s dog is called to mind because the tenor of today is the same as why dogs aren’t excited by the moon anymore. Once there was only the moon, Stein told us by way of illustration, and the dog was dazzled being out in the night. Then there were other lights, too many lights and the moon lost its place in the firmament of the dog’s wonder. Now the world shows us too much light, too many flicking images, too many things to need and buy and eat and add and lose and grasp and want and no possible antidotes to soothe and offer a simple coherence, an idea of ourselves we might see if the night were quiet and still and we had only the orb of the white moon to contemplate, some times.

The success of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas brought about significant changes for Stein in what she said was a question of identity and a question of the outside being outside and the inside being inside and that was how it should remain. As to a dematerializing self, identity being self, Stein didn’t waiver, I’d say never even a quiver on the issue of identity and self. “And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then you of course you do not believe yourself.” Recognizing the impossibility or unreliability of autobiography—telling the self—she wrote, “That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right.” And to close on the subject of surety of self, “You are of course never yourself.” The faithless untruthful self left to draw on the random shifting store of the contents of what was revealed to Nabokov in the brief flash and blaze that maybe did light the two dense black piers of eternity between which swung, hammock-like, the starry glittering radiant weave that was his illuminated life.

So if we are the composite parts of our memory, the lived and perceived history that shaped us or out of which we’ve drawn ourselves and it’s always shifting and as Gertrude Stein stated without question and now beyond questioning anyway, if you had dared—what is the truth to put a steady foot on? Mark Twain, the progenitor of the credible American mythos, is reassuring here, telling us in 1907, “When I was younger, I could remember anything whether it happened or not,” this from a draft chapter of Autobiography printed in a 1907 issue of North American Review. Chief Broom concurred, you’ll want to know. “These things are true whether they happened or not,” he pronounced, sounding an echo of Twain, as the narrator in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Some things we know to be true.

Looking deeply, slowly, with wistfulness at a photograph of four people I loved is telling me something about the mix of truth and memory. I never knew any of these people who were central to my life from my birth to the present as they appear in the photograph I hold. As they are, for me in this photo, they don’t exist in memory, but the truthfulness of their presence can’t be questioned. I look at the image, they are there, these four fine young people, true and young, exuberant as they are foregrounded in the image, in the backyard of their parents’ home. “396 Charles Street, 1943” is hand printed on a label affixed to the back of the frame. Before I’d heard Lucinda Williams sing “Lake Charles,” I claimed that the street name carried romance. Really? The song aches the heart and sways the body; they lived on Charles before Lucinda sang, before I was born. Still, it’s all of a piece: the song, Louisiana, about as far as you can get from the Manitoba prairies where Charles Street still runs, as far as that dog’s eclipsed moon and these four young people and all the years and their separate lives with their heads full of things only they knew in the stock of memory I’m trying to infiltrate as though it were a solid locked box that held some truth on which to secure my own.

My father, the oldest, tallest, slender, wearing a three-piece suit, vest with last button undone, jacket open—a nice light wool tweed and I think I see a thin chain looped to his trouser pocket as was the style. Nicely knotted tie, good collar, high broad forehead, broad full smile. Next, my aunt, the older of two, short dark hair parted to the side in a soft wave, looking straight ahead, almost a smile. Her arm around my father’s waist shows small fingers gently holding the fabric of his jacket. Beside her the “baby,” the youngest child, my aunt then a teenager in a short, loose plaid skirt, a sweater over a blouse with the collar points showing at the neck, hair a colour described at the time as “dirty blonde” just brushing her shoulders, a smile as broad as my father’s, one knee flexed forward, ready for motion. My uncle on the right, in uniform, the bomber jacket a half-size too large, cap at the correctly cocked angle, a small face, delicate features, a smile genuine but less full. One hand fingers his wrist at the cuff. The younger sister’s left hand rests on the outside pocket of his soldier’s trousers. Family. I don’t know them as they are here and it’s years before they are adults for me so that I can go back and add to the concreteness of the photograph, ferret from the cache of my own acquired perceptions to which I add pieces of stories told or overheard when I sat under the dinner table on the patterned rug and knew everyone’s knees and shins and ankles and shoes, knew them as separate characters as though they were the dressed wooden limbs of string puppets, additional beings independent of the whole bodies that animated them. Synecdoche as an enrichment, a multiplication of family members below and above the table.

I add nothing in the description of these four cherished people except what I can see—ocular proof and therefore the truth. I don’t say that my father’s smile pulled everyone to him, that a joke and a shapely laugh were always just there, that my older aunt looked a little severe because she wasn’t told by the family that she was pretty but she was in such a steady way and I loved her as a favourite aunt all the time and not only when she sat on the floor to play. The “baby” aunt was quick and noisy and until later, when married, was occupied, in spite of the din and whirl, with a complicated interior life, as it came to be, and my delicate uncle dreamed and slept and made odd inventions that almost worked, should have worked, should have worked.

Is this descriptive elaboration true? I write from my memory that is replete with days and pictures and connections and endless dinners on the shores of Lake Charles Street, Manitoba.

My father and uncle and older aunt and grandfather all worked together in a business of their own making for which none but my grandfather was in any way suited. He’d come from Russia as a child with his family, running from the czar. His father had been a coach painter. The business that somehow came together and just supported four families but would have done well with only one, closed at four on Saturdays, cutting the working week short with such a brief pause. An auto body repair shop. Not one was a mechanic, a welder, could operate a hoist. My grandfather being barely proximate to painting a vehicle through his father, who hadn’t done that since he’d left Russia with his young family and who family stories describe as saintly, quiet, and was run down and killed just years after arriving. He, seeing a cart with runaway horses rushing down Main Street, recognized it as belonging to a friend, stepped in front of the horses to calm and stop them and ended there, in the street. My father wanted to be a dentist; my uncle graduated as an electrical engineer and that dream would have been included with others when, present, he also seemed to absent himself from the glorious heady smell of auto enamel paint (which I loved) and drift into another life he could have entered except it was too hard to get a placement as a Jew wanting to spark cables and animate the world with new kinds of light. This family—father, uncle, grandfather and nimble-fingered aunt at the typer—worked together every day in a surviving business and still met often, had meetings at night, in my grandparents’ home in the “rec room” to confer about—what. Memory serves me nothing here except for a magical tin bucket and tight-fitting lid filled with—no one could guess—an exotic hard cinnamon candy, little sticks filled with chocolate, called “Chicken Bones.” They were meted out to me as though they were gold and now my thin frame is bird bones of its own manufacture, and no memory scan reveals the cause or reason for the tin pail of pink glory.

The memory, clearly incomplete as a narrative, or maybe serving fine as fragment, might lead if probed again to more of the story and I make an effort to go back but it is raining that day and walking through the thin skin of water on the sidewalk I am jolted, but lightly, by a fallen wire, shocked by what I might retrieve and I, conjuring my uncle, rewire the event so that the subsequent recall can be an enlivening tingle and not at all unpleasant.

This is memory and I trust it. It is sufficient. I do stand on this.❚