I just heard news about the old Victorian house of my childhood in Bath, New York. When I lived there, it was painted a traditional, pleasant beige with maroon trim and accents, and maybe green shutters. Now, according to my informant, it has become quite a spectacle. “Let’s just say it will never disappear during a blizzard,” she remarked. Luckily for everyone, there will invariably be a blizzard in western New York, within the next decade; so we can all put her observation to the test.
My first thought about the news was that I have no attachment to the house. I never did. I wasn’t sad to leave it, and I don’t care what becomes of it.
Indeed there are no emotions in my memory surrounding that house. To my surprise, this is not an instance of my otherwise very bad memory. I remember feeling nothing when I moved. I remember trying to feel nothing about it. I remember telling others that I felt nothing.
But all of this remembering comes as quite a shock. I do have an exceptionally poor memory. So the fact that I have memories surrounding the process of leaving this house makes me think that my first thought was missing the mark. I think my memory is accurate in telling me that I wasn’t sad to leave it, but it betrays something else by being able to recall that negative emotional fact so distinctly.
This is all just a big preface to what I intended to write about: my memory has been bad “for as long as I can remember,” but there’s a mystery here that is begging to be explored.
My father also has a troublesome memory. He is encyclopedic in some ways; ask him about modern music or botany, and then be prepared to sit down. He cannot, however, recall much of his childhood or teenage years, nor a lot of more recent events. My mind works on a pattern similar to his, I assume. I can remember things that I’ve heard or seen or read so long as they are filed into a kind of encyclopedic system. But “what happens” to me or to others around me often pass away quite quickly—if not falling into that larger filing system, with its apparently finite number of labels for significance. I cannot remember most of my childhood. I don’t have a good sense of important dates: for example, when I first moved, or at what age I started playing soccer, or when my parents were divorced, or when I became friends with so-and-so. After poking and prodding I can sometimes narrow them down, but it doesn’t come easily, and each time I try to think about them I have to go through the same process of narrowing down.
And then the mystery. I now suspect that this old house has so many memories tied to it. I wonder: “How much of this poor memory of mine is only so because I attached my thought to things along the way, and then the things themselves were taken from me?” This attachment carries a different sense than the one in my first thought, mentioned above. It is not that I am attached to the house in a way that necessarily provokes an emotional reaction, but that I is attached to it. With the things, such as that house, coming and going, there is an I that comes and goes.
What if all the “happenings” that I have forgotten are only gone because I filed the memory externally. They’re not gone simply because they are in the past, but because I let them fall upon something else that did not endure or stay with me. Maybe I could have tried to attach them to something else within me that I wouldn’t lose, and they would have remained. (Is that what we call “learning”?) Maybe I am too much in the habit of letting “what happens” stay outside, stay tied to the things that I won’t take with me, things whose likeness it is hard to imagine without an external likeness….
None of this is new for psychologists. I’ve read about it plenty. But I hadn’t experience the significance of the thoughts for myself until tonight.
My next mission is to get my hands on some old and new photographs of the house, to see what else emerges.
