How reliable are memories, particularly those from distant childhood? Phonological signs inscribed in myriad loops made of fragile neural connections. How authoritative can that be? Our actual narratives said to be filling gaps, rearranging data so as to allow us to recognize, today, all the human knowledge we may have held in the past. Transient patterns of what we have experienced for ourselves, jumping over discrepancies, passages that time has perhaps wisely chosen to negate.
Vivid scenes that no one else remembers, but me. And why? Moments where I think I had a real, frontal relationship to the world, getting stuck decades later in factual inconsistencies ravines inside the skull, only rare, thin threads to lead me out of constructed myths.
Or have I found, now shedding doubt on how I consolidate information, a new way to discredit mnemonic accuracy so to speed up and justify deletion?
That’s the story of how I began to write.
Tracing within the limits of short-term memory what the long-term one had to store. Making sure it would do so.
The instant I was able to, I constantly wrote, creating visual alphabets for events, images, forcing, cramming spatial entities, the letters - memorization guaranteed by ink on paper. Verbatim.
My agony: Whenever people would swear not having said this or that.
It would go back. I would check. Black on white. Written. Not going crazy.
I had this fantasy that I wasn’t my parents’ daughter, that I had been adopted.
Unfortunately, on each of my birthdays, my mother served the same story. By the time the cake had its candles ready to be blown, she had already drank too much, I could have counted the number of sips needed to trigger the moment where, again, she would rant: The night the contractions had started, my father refusing to get up to drive her to the hospital. I had been born in the midst of marital discord. Birth as an expression of polarities, male egotism versus female sacrifice, consecrated by the uterine cramps I inflicted as I made my way to cheerless family reunions.
As my mother ripped her blouse at the dining table to better highlight the suffering that had been hers an “x” number of years ago, concurring with my age, my father would get up and silently walk away, a disgusted look on his face.
December 6, every year. Ruining my fantasy that genetically I had nothing to do with these people.
But later, honey, between the December 6 of one year and the December 6 of the following year, my mother would deny having made a scene. With Herculean strength, ripping if necessary her clothes again to guarantee the authenticity of her amnesia.
I would retreat to my written accounts as a consolation, relieved the year after to hear her one more time put into place the framework that would hold the details of how I was born. Showing me with stable periodicity that I wasn’t completely mad, lending support to my juvenile literary efforts at ascertaining that fact.
The system worked marvelously well as a whole, each component’s behavior determined by a set of unequivocal repetitions, rendering memory, after all, not so indispensable. As a plenitude, or as a fragment.
Laolao
Vivid scenes that no one else remembers, but me. And why? Moments where I think I had a real, frontal relationship to the world, getting stuck decades later in factual inconsistencies ravines inside the skull, only rare, thin threads to lead me out of constructed myths.
Or have I found, now shedding doubt on how I consolidate information, a new way to discredit mnemonic accuracy so to speed up and justify deletion?
That’s the story of how I began to write.
Tracing within the limits of short-term memory what the long-term one had to store. Making sure it would do so.
The instant I was able to, I constantly wrote, creating visual alphabets for events, images, forcing, cramming spatial entities, the letters - memorization guaranteed by ink on paper. Verbatim.
My agony: Whenever people would swear not having said this or that.
It would go back. I would check. Black on white. Written. Not going crazy.
I had this fantasy that I wasn’t my parents’ daughter, that I had been adopted.
Unfortunately, on each of my birthdays, my mother served the same story. By the time the cake had its candles ready to be blown, she had already drank too much, I could have counted the number of sips needed to trigger the moment where, again, she would rant: The night the contractions had started, my father refusing to get up to drive her to the hospital. I had been born in the midst of marital discord. Birth as an expression of polarities, male egotism versus female sacrifice, consecrated by the uterine cramps I inflicted as I made my way to cheerless family reunions.
As my mother ripped her blouse at the dining table to better highlight the suffering that had been hers an “x” number of years ago, concurring with my age, my father would get up and silently walk away, a disgusted look on his face.
December 6, every year. Ruining my fantasy that genetically I had nothing to do with these people.
But later, honey, between the December 6 of one year and the December 6 of the following year, my mother would deny having made a scene. With Herculean strength, ripping if necessary her clothes again to guarantee the authenticity of her amnesia.
I would retreat to my written accounts as a consolation, relieved the year after to hear her one more time put into place the framework that would hold the details of how I was born. Showing me with stable periodicity that I wasn’t completely mad, lending support to my juvenile literary efforts at ascertaining that fact.
The system worked marvelously well as a whole, each component’s behavior determined by a set of unequivocal repetitions, rendering memory, after all, not so indispensable. As a plenitude, or as a fragment.
Laolao
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