It’s daunting to imagine all the things I’ve forgotten. What percentage of a life gets remembered? A slender one for certain – even the people and events we remember we remember in silhouette, in snippets of noise and face and smell, old anecdotes told through a game of telephone, old wax cylinders which every time we play them back we warp slightly – for the act of remembering both preserves and defaces the memory each and every time.
We like to imagine ourselves, our existence, as something solid, concrete, like a house we live in – but we’re more like a fire, a process that will end if it runs out of heat, fuel, or oxygen, a process that will have an impact on the world around it, positive or negative, burning or warming. Our memories, likewise, are a process within a process, more similar to a conversation overheard than a book being read. All of this I’ve known for some time, but the gap between knowledge and belief is broad and deep. I still seek memory, preservation, seek the kind of permanence of self that is adjacent to immortality and is approximately as attainable. Perhaps the reason I feel inconsistent and unreliable is not because I am particularly so, but because I am compared in my mind to this static version of myself, this statue, the object in object permanence, the machine in Problem Machine, the self who persists after looking away from a mirror.
It might be that wanting someone to be the same person two weeks in a row was never a reasonable request, that we just pretend it is for the sake of convenience. A person is a program, constantly adjusting itself to try to bring its results closer to some sort of an ideal: Every aspect of this system is in flux, and this is beautiful and sad to witness. It’s obvious, looking from this angle, that as much as we fear and run from death we are always dying bit by bit – not just getting older, but losing pieces of ourselves, memories, friends, homes, passions… But, even with death as our constant companion, eating our leftovers, snatching bits of us away while we’re not looking, we’re still alive. The process continues, new memories, new friends, new homes, new passions, as long as you have heat, fuel, and oxygen. Death only comes when the process stops – or, perhaps, one might prefer to think, when the process is complete. Any motion is life, and forgetting is sometimes necessary for that motion to persist.
Maybe this is why we love to make things. Maybe this is why we love to buy things. Maybe we love clothing and decorations and paint and flowers simply because they’re often the only points of contact we have between ourselves and whoever we were yesterday. We may have been brutally divorced from ourselves by the razor edge of past and present, castaways from our history, but we at least have this poster, this toaster, this coaster in common.
“It’s not much,” I say to myself: “Just something to remember me by.”