Memory

Memory is an adornment.
The only marking made upon a body by its own hands
And thus to know one from another.


The purpose of narrative is to create meaning. Experience itself has no essential qualities beyond basic sensory input. The world is perceived as an unrelated succession of lights and sounds and impact. These data are processed by the central nervous system and joined in an attempt to make predictions about the environment which will facilitate survival. The urge to organize, to make meaning through association, is a hallmark of humankind. Experimentation teaches that a certain series of sensory phenomena indicates danger while another indicates safety. Language allows these sequences to be labeled and explained. It becomes possible to convey the lesson without the experiment. This conveyance is narrative. Narrative is the primary method for imposing order on gross input. It is the method used to remember such order oneself and to share it with others. After the sensory input – the experience – has passed, what is left behind as memory is an approximation of that experience which is distinct from the experience itself. This fact is so obvious and such a commonplace that it is rarely examined. Recollection is necessary to catalogue memory, but also to create a sense of self and a sense of context among other non-selves. Narratives agreed upon by many become the foundation of culture. It is, no doubt, a useful evolutionary strategy, but one that involves a certain amount of construction.

Experience is limited by perspective. A given viewer witnesses a given event from a particular vantage point, which influences understanding. Perspective is both physical, as in an observer’s actual field of view, but also psychological. One sees what one expects to see. Such elements of subjectivity ensure that even the most meticulous attempt to relate past events is definitionally handicapped. There is an unbridgeable distance between experience and memory. Attempts to share those memories with others widens the distance further. When narrative is shared, each participant introduces a new perspective and a new set of variables. The information is subject to a new set of filters which alters final understanding. “Truth”, if such a thing exists, is not accessible. Unfortunately, such a postmodern approach is as uncommon as it is unsatisfying. The more we empower narrative as an explanatory device the more we need to believe in its fundamental trueness. Even those who are familiar with such theories suspend disbelief in order to privilege certain narratives. Even in fiction, a genre approached and understood as imaginative, readers require a level of plausibility based on seemingly arbitrary guidelines, many of which are created and perpetuated by the works themselves. Anomalous events, which occur in experience, are frowned upon in fiction. A constructed narrative, labeled as such, is judged by a different metric than the narratives we ascribe to direct experience, but is judged nonetheless. Whether or not something is true, or at least believable, matters.

It's how we recognize each other. I'm told that can happen.