Another meditation on memory

Dear diary,

I’m fascinated by the way that memory works. Or rather, I’m fascinated by the way that memory does not work. I like how memory fails in its purpose, because it seems to me that memory’s job is to follow a rule: to preserve sensory experiences by copying stimuli accurately. And I hate jobs and rules; or rather, I love to quit jobs and break rules; so I’m intrigued by how memory fails to fulfill its job description of “accurate copier of reality”. The failure of memory is one side of a coin whose obverse is the creativity of imagination. It’s like there’s a mental energy, and it can expend itself either by holding a rigid pose, attempting perfectly to ape whatever sensory stimuli it has encountered — that would be an example of “remembering” — OR this mental energy can allow itself to flow freely and dance with whatever stimuli it encounters — this would be an example of “imagining”. It’s like waking versus dreaming: the awake brain compulsively copies the surrounding sensory stimuli, whereas the sleeping mind compulsively dances with this same phantasmagoria. And just as rules are welcome because it’s so enjoyable to bend them, memory’s attractiveness is proportionate to its inaccuracy. This reminds me of that line of dialogue that I quote all the time, from the film Lost Highway (1997) — Fred Madison sez:

I like to remember things my own way… Not necessarily the way they happened.

And what’s so lucky about our existence is that it’s truly impossible to remember anything altogether precisely, in a flawless way; that is, it’s not even feasible to make a perfect copy of anything we sense. We humans are imagination in the flesh.

This reminds me of another thing I once heard Jean Cocteau say — I don’t remember the source (thank God) so I just did a quick search on the trusty-dusty Internet and came back with this quote:

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

This is an idea that I’d like to play around with. First I’d like to imagine an experience and then picture how someone might misremember it. Let’s say we’re in the police station, and a couple of cops are talking to an old acquaintance in the interrogation chamber. There’s a good cop and a bad cop. And the interviewee’s name is Mademoiselle Lawbreaker. Here’s how their conversation might go:

GOOD COP: “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Lawbreaker! It’s so nice to see you. Thanks for allowing us to drag you away from that glade in the park where we found you. Thank you for not resisting as we cuffed you and hauled you down here to the station in our paddy wagon. And, most of all, thanks for apparently not minding that we did all this without charging you with a crime.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “No, thank you. It’s my pleasure.”

GOOD COP: “Now, here’s the deal. Me and my partner are gonna tell you all the acts that we suppose you perpetrated yesterday, and then we’re gonna ask you to try to repeat back to us every last detail of all these crimes that we just claimed we saw you commit. And if you don’t end up remembering everything correctly — that is, if your account of your day does not match our account of your day — then we shall consider all the deviations in your affidavit as an admission of guilt; and we’ll accordingly charge you with lying to the police.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “I understand.”

GOOD COP: “Alright, I’ll let my partner begin the inquisition, because he holds in his hand the dot-matrix printout of all the citations that we fabricated this morning during our daily office-meeting. I basically paced around the room and dictated a play-by-play account of your malfeasances, while he sat at the keyboard and typed it all up. So he’ll be reading from that official record. Meanwhile, all I’ll do is occasionally interrupt his rundown to add a minor clarification or a specific point that I feel should be reinforced. In short, we’re just trying to develop a scientific timeline of your recent crime spree. And, for my part, as opposed to referencing your rap sheet, I’ll be relying solely upon my own memory, which has been certified as photographic and is therefore trustworthy.”

BAD COP: “Wait. I never knew this — who’d you get to officially certify your memory?”

GOOD COP: “The precinct’s expert. Shauna, I think her name is. You sit down with her, answer a few questions, and she hands you a certification.”

BAD COP: “Shauna Christiansen? Fox’s ex wife?”

GOOD COP: “I don’t recall. Look, we’re short on time, so I’ll just start. Now, one fact that I can verify, Mademoiselle Lawbreaker, is that you woke up at 5:00 a.m. and drank a cocktail while composing a secret missive on your laptop computer until roughly 8:00 a.m. — I know this because I was the one who was operating the camera-drone that was hovering outside your window.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “That is correct.”

BAD COP: “No, you don’t have to say anything until the end. Just wait till we finish. Then we’ll ask you to recite back for us the synopsis of your day, and we’ll catch you on all sorts of errors, and then we can jail you.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “Sorry. I was just trying to be helpful.”

GOOD COP: “Well, in the future, if you feel any further ‘urges to help’, just think of them as if they are bullets, and treat them like they’ve been loaded into a gun that has its safety lock engaged. In other words, don’t let them shoot out and ricochet around the room and annoy the bejeezus out of us. We simply do not want to deal with any kind impulses.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “I’m sorry. Proceed.”

GOOD COP: “Alrighty, now, to sum up, you awoke at sunrise and wrote a blog post using your typewriter. Then you went on a walk with your dog named Sandcastle. Then you robbed a liquor store. Then you set fire to a—”

BAD COP: “No, she didn’t set fire to anything. It sez here that she’s definitely not an arsonist. That’s one of the character traits where you made me put a little star next to it & add a note saying: ‘This is important.’ What you’re trying to maintain, I think, according to this next line of her rap sheet, is that Mademoiselle Lawbreaker encountered a bush on a mountainside that was already ablaze — so, she didn’t start this fire — moreover, its flames could not consume the bush (I’m not sure if there was even smoke, then — cuz you’d think that if there was fire, there’d also be smoke; but I guess there might not have been); and it looks like there’s a sticky note affixed near this section of the printout — I see that it’s signed by all three of us, both you, me, and Captain Fox, so it seems to be legit — and this addendum proclaims that the reason the bush refused to burn up is, quote, because it knew that Mademoiselle Lawbreaker can do no wrong; so it did not want to act in a way that might be misconstrued as circumstantial evidence proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that she had committed a brazen act of sorcery on behalf of her husband the Devil. No, on the contrary, the note concludes, saying: Wherever she walks, flowers sprout up in her wake.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “Thank you. That is true.”

GOOD COP: “Shh. Shush now, both of you. Alright, so, let me review what we have here. Just the facts. OK, now I’m gonna talk fast, so you better listen fast: One, you got up before the sun rose. Two, you hand-wrote a letter to your grandmother. Three; you robbed a liquor store. Four, you met the Everlasting One on a lonely hillock in the southeastern region of Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Five: you brought your dog Sandy to dine with me and my wife—”

BAD COP: “Wait. What? You dined with her? But when I called you to see if you wanted to go to the ballgame, you said that you had a preexisting condition—”

GOOD COP: “I said prearranged appointment.”

BAD COP: “Alright, prearranged appointment, whatever. I called and asked if you’d wanna go to the game and then afterwards maybe grab something to eat with ME — cuz you’re my partner, and partners come first! but you answered me via text message saying that you were busy, and you ended your message with a middle-finger emoticon—”

GOOD COP: “That was a mistake. I meant to click the ‘thumbs up’ icon.”

BAD COP: “—so I attended the game all by myself; then afterwards I called up Mademoiselle Lawbreaker and dined with her instead. Now I ask: If you and I did not spend our evening together, then how could she dine with both of us at once? Is she some sort of Spirit that can be in multiple places simultaneously, and consume as much food as she desires without even putting on any weight? Cuz look: her figure is spellbinding. But now look at me: I got this huge gut, just because I refuse to cut french fries out of my diet.” [BAD COP pats the sides of his belly with both hands.]

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “The truth is that I dined with both of you, indeed, but at separate hours. I enjoyed a large meal at Monsieur Dove’s house at five o’clock; and then I had a lighter supper and a number of drinks with Monsieur Crow at eight. That’s just the right amount of space between feasts: you two eat at very different times of the evening: it’s basically luncheon and supper, to me. So if a cat-burglar befriends both of you fellows, as I have done, then she can eat two square meals almost every single day without paying a cent, while concurrently establishing matching, credible alibis for any crimes she commits. — Now may I give my own version of my own story? I’d like to wrap this up; for I’m supposed to meet our mutual friend Mrs. Evilman outside that same bank where you saw us last May Day; and I fear I’ll be late for the heist, if you guys don’t soon find a reason to pardon me for my scandalous behavior.”

GOOD COP: “That’s fine. Go ahead; tell us what your side of the events is. See if you can wriggle out of the net that we’ve so deftly positioned to ensnare you.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “Okay, first I woke at noon, actually closer to 2:30 p.m., because I never rise before my dreams have concluded; and I remember clearly that yesterday’s dreams were a series of erotic episodes that occurred in gentle succession, one after the next, with lovely narrative fragments connecting them to hold my interest; so it was like binge-watching a season of your favorite TV miniseries, except with extremely tasteful nudity.”

BAD COP: “My favorite series has just as much nudity as yours — I don’t understand what the big difference is. Nudity is not just for dreams anymore: as a species, we have evolved so that most of our television programs show nudity too, now.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “I said extremely tasteful nudity.”

BAD COP: “Ah, thanks for the reiteration. I feel duly chastised.”

GOOD COP: “Okay, now go on, Mademoiselle Lawbreaker, and continue your own account of how your day went yesterday; but please speak a little slower — I’m trying to write all this down in this pocket-sized notebook with this tiny pencil, and for some reason I keep blanking on the proper shorthand, so I’m afraid that, without your cooperation, I might fall behind.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “No problem. Is this slow enough?”

GOOD COP: “That’s perfect, thanks.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “Alright, so after I finished my breakfast of Glam Brand sausages with eggs served over-easy and two bottles of wine (yes, even tho it’s mid-afternoon, I still eat a traditional breakfast), I walked down the block and stopped at the skateboard arena, because it has been entirely taken over by stray dogs, and I enjoy watching them chase each other up and down the ramps. I’ve never had any pets of my own, so I get a thrill from observing animals in the wild. Then I skipped to the beach and gazed at the ocean for a while; then I sculpted a miniature sphinx in the sand; then I robbed the liquor store; and then I luncheon’d with Monsieur Crow. After he and his wife and I made love, I stole his golf bag and pawned all the clubs that were in it; then I dined with Monsieur Dove, and presented him the bag as a token of my affection. Once he passed out, I left his house thru the bedroom window & strolled about leisurely until I found a glade in a nearby park. I stopped there, disrobed, and spent the rest of the night praying to the moon.”

BAD COP [shaking his head while blinking in astonishment at the printout form in his hand]: “What she sez checks out exactly.”

GOOD COP: “Yes, I can see where we went wrong. We mixed up a couple facts, during the transcription process: It was not a dog named Sandman dashing over the beach like Pharaoh in his chariot when the Red Sea split, but rather a Sphinx that was fashioned out of the sands of Egypt by our culprit here, after she met the God of Time and Space in a mountain-bush. Remember that bush that we couldn’t get to ignite the other day when we were out arsoning around?—I bet that was cuz it had recently rained. And probably earlier some prophet had passed by and cursed the bush so that it would never catch fire again, and the dead plant misunderstood at first and assumed he meant that it should never allow fire to play in its branches, but then after thinking for awhile it figured out that the prohibition only applied to trapping fire exclusively inside itself and thus refusing to share it with others: so that’s why it wasn’t consumed. It had light without warmth. That’s like creation without destruction: you really shouldn’t separate them. The other type of fire is what they used for the construction of Hell: the kind that has heat but no light. That’s almost worse: that’s the stuff you wanna stay away from.”

BAD COP [unlocking the interviewee’s handcuffs]: “Alright, Miss El, it looks like we’re gonna have to pardon you again. You’re free to go. Only please try to sin no more.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “Thanks, guys. What do I owe ya?”

GOOD COP: “This one’s on the house.”

BAD COP: “That’s right. Go in peace now.”

MADEMOISELLE LAWBREAKER: “I got a twenty spot. Can you break it?”

GOOD COP: “That’ll work. Here’s two fives, and…” [counts out banknotes from his purse] “...one… two… three singles.”

*

So that’s all I really wanted to do, with this entry. But I intended for that last example to be shorter. I simply wanted to have the cops deliver about a paragraph-long synopsis of a suspect’s day, and then the suspect would recap from memory the same synopsis in a sentence or two. It would demonstrate the way that simple facts can be warped by an attempt to recollect them. I therefore consider the above attempt a failure, because it droned on with too many digressions and thus negated its own purpose. It was fun to do, tho; and it pretty much wrote itself; so I’ll keep it as it is.

Yet now I wanna try again, putting myself in the hot seat. But I’m out of time. So I think that tomorrow (or however long it takes me — who knows? perhaps I’ll never get around to following up on this) I will attempt a slightly different memory-experiment. Here’s my idea: working simply from my own recollections, I’ll try to re-tell the narrative of a movie that I’ve seen many times: a picture that I know well enough to summarize, but whose plot is convoluted enough to ensure that I’ll mangle at least some of its details — I’m thinking of The Big Sleep (1946). — Seriously, I think I must’ve seen that film about a zillion times, but I still don’t understand what’s supposed to be happening in it; all I know is that I like it.