Selective Memory - Filtering Out The Wife, The Absolute Fiction of Remembering Anything

'How could you not remember?', Phil's wife said, incredulous that Phil had no recollection of the backyard barbecue at Aunt Tilly's.  'And the rainstorm where all had to huddle under the oak tree? And Bobby's...'. Here, flustered and exasperated she couldn't go on.  The insolence of the man, the deliberate indifference, the chutzpah...

 

But of course Phil didn't remember the event, and there was nothing deliberate about it.  So much of what his wife said had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to even the vaguest, dimmest corner of his life, and so it passed unregistered in his memory. 

'Only much storage space on the hard drive', he laughed; but his wife was of a different mind.  Everything a wife said to a husband, regardless of his particular mental sieve, was important ipso facto.  That was what marriage was all about, mutual respect.  Aunt Tilly had been her favorite aunt and that barbecue in the rainstorm was a summer thing, a yearly thing, an important thing.  It was insulting and demeaning that her husband couldn't even remember that it happened. 

'Sorry, sweetheart', Phil said, 'maybe it will come back to me', but it never would because it had never been imprinted on the cerebellum.  That and a hundred other stories his wife insisted on telling over dinner, a virtual tsunami of aunts, second cousins, Easter, deaths, births, birthdays, and trips to the Poconos.  

She had so many cousins that no one could keep them straight, let alone Phil who had never met them but thanks to his wife's retelling, was supposed to fit them into the pattern of his own life, bring them to life, make the children digging in the sand at Rehoboth real and relevant. 

'Bette Evans died', his wife said over pot roast and simmered carrots, and Phil knew that when death was brought up - an event that everyone was supposed to remember if only as a reminder of one's own frail existence - listening and remembering was called for. Yet he had no clue who Bette Evans was, not even a fragment, something that would reconstitute her, bring her to the table. 

'Don't tell me you don't remember Bette', his wife said sternly, accusingly. 'You were there!', she added, referring to some event where he must have met the woman, at least crossed paths, but nothing registered, not a glimmer, not one. 

Bob Tillman, a colleague of Phil's at the World Bank told him this story:

One day I got a call from a Susan Ballard who said that she was in town for a few days and would love to catch up.  I had no idea at all who she was, but because she went on with such fondness and even intimacy, I figured that it would come to me as soon as I saw here. 'So we'll meet in the B Lobby at noon next Thursday'. she said; but when the time came, when I got off the elevator and looked around the lobby and recognized no one, I assumed that I was early; but just then this modestly attractive women ran up to me, gave me a big hug, smiled, and said, 'It's been far too long'

I assumed that it would come to me and I would remember who she was yet over lunch despite everything nothing came back.  I tried everything, continents, work details, flights, colleagues, nothing. We chattered on about the new exhibit at the Renwick, family ('How're Mary and the kids', she asked), the foie gras in Antananarivo, and bullying.  Still nothing, and the longer the conversation went on, the more uncomfortable I felt. By the time coffee came I still had remembered nothing. 

'We must do this again', she said on K Street hailing a cab, and off she went.  I never did remember who she was or where I met her.  I have a good memory for most things. 

When Phil heard the story he, after so much caviling and hectoring by his wife about incidental people, he could quite easily understand how a woman - any woman - could have passed through Bob Tillman's life without notice.  Whatever happened in the past mattered to her not him.   There was no mnemonic theory of mutual resonance.  Being at the same time in the same moment and in the same place was not a fixture in both memories. Subjectivity. 

There had been a recent article in the Post about a drive-by shooting in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare of Washington.  All went according to plan - arrest, arraignment, and jury trial but the odd thing, the journalist noted, was that according to the defense lawyer after a mistrial was called, no bystander who had witnessed the event could agree on who did the shooting, what kind of car it was, who was driving, and who actually did it.  The defense deliberately brought one eyewitness to the stand after the other so that the jury could hear the 'evidence'.  

The shooting happened on a clear, sunny day, traffic was moving normally, and there was no way that the five bystanders who agreed to testify couldn't have seen the same thing, but they did. 

Writers Robert Browning and Lawrence Durrell and filmmaker Akira Kurosawa all wrote masterpieces about different people observing one event saw in different ways.  The Ring and the Book and The Alexandria Quartet were both visions of reality which only proved there was no such thing. 

Recent scientific research has shown that most memory is imagined, influenced by the accounts of others, events subsequent to the initial memory, and simple erosion. Professor Erika Hayasaki  of Duke summarized the conclusions:

Writers of memoir, history, and journalism yearn for specific details when combing through memories to tell true stories. But such work has always come with the caveat that human memory is fallible. Now, scientists have an idea of just how unreliable it actually can be. New research has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune (The Atlantic 2.4.13)

Social psychologist Jill Neimark echoes  memorist Vladimir Nabokov  (Speak, Memory) in suggesting that ‘memory is the bedrock of the self’, but goes on to confirm that memory is very fallible:

Memory, it turns out, is both far more complex and more primitive than we knew. Ancient parts of the brain can record memory before it even reaches our senses--our sight and hearing, for instance. At the same time, there are between 200 and 400 billion neurons in the brain and each neuron has about 10,000 connections.  The parallel processing involved in memory is so complex we can't even begin to think how it works, The one thing that we can say for certain is that if memory is the bedrock of the self, then even though that self may seem coherent and unchanging, it is built on shifting sands.

So Nabokov’s prized past may be nothing more than a fictionalized composite of imperfectly-recalled experience, the recollection of others, and the additive ‘corrections’ of books, films, and drama.  We are not what we were, but what we think we were.

Every year Leona Patri had the whole family over for Easter dinner - uncles, brothers-in-law, cousins, maiden aunts, and old grandmothers - and after many bottles of Lambrusco and Asti Spumante the conversation became voluble, everybody putting in their two cents about what happened to old Harry Grillo when he backed the car into traffic, or to Faith O'Reilly when she ran afoul of Father Briganti, or the Tweedy twins, Zackin the optometrist, or the Petrucci brothers. 

All had been there for all of it and no one could agree on what exactly happened. Leona had to referee. 

Phil thought of all this while he listened to his wife go on about the Lewitzky brothers registering nothing at all. 'New Jersey...the Tappan Zee bridge...Harlem River Drive...Esta's burnt roast...Baby Jake's colic...' a kind of ebbing and flowing of a tide, washing over the sand leaving no trace, rearranging the pebbles. 

'What?  Don't tell me you don't remember the Lewitzky brothers', his wife said but alas his memory was vacant.  If they had ever passed through, they left no trace whatsoever. 

It was even more galling for Phil's wife that she not only remembered the details of her past but his.  She brought up memories of his life that he had either long forgotten or never bothered to remember.  Why did she have to be the family archivist?

The family needed no curator, Phil knew. What would be the purpose, filing incidental, never agreed upon bits and pieces, collected at random, assembled willy-nilly according to some fleeting recollection?

'You don't care about me', said his wife almost in tears; and perhaps a bit of that was true. He certainly didn't care about those remembered incidents she revived on a daily basis. 

Nabokov remarked that the present was only an event of milliseconds and the future only a realm of possibility. Only the past was real, defining, and the only validation of existence.  So perhaps Phil was being too dismissive.  Perhaps he should pay more attention, listen not tune out.  Yet the very next time she started in on Bea Tandon's arthroscopy and young Billy's hernia, he said, 'Sunken costs'.