Oceans of the Forgotten

When I look back on my life, turn my thoughts to accounting for past events, beyond a week or so ago, memories fade.  Each day in the past, thumbing through the calendar, each day a little less distinct, fading into what folk metaphors tell us of our memory warehouse, a kind of secret library in our mind littered with cobwebs and dark dusty corners.  Banker’s boxes on shelves, file cabinets, pictures, antiques, a spiral staircase to different levels; the shiftable inner recesses, the Xanadu of the mind.  Some areas of the warehouse are in front, accessible, others more discrete, or hidden, even some places with more security than others, requiring a series of keys.  But the memories are only apprehended as much as we can pay attention to them.  As if we traipse around the memory warehouse with a single torch – you can only see as far as the light goes, the rest fading to shades of grey and the darkness beyond.   

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I’ve been rumored by some to be something of a human encyclopedia, a trove of both trivial and not so trivial factoids.  Yet this belies the truth that there are oceans of the forgotten.  I know there are people I’ve known for years and years, but if I haven’t seen them lately, their memory isn’t refreshed.  I can only outline their general personality and characteristics, the details withered to a mere skeletal frame.  We feel this when we’ve been reunited with an old friend and start to reminisce only to realize our own nostalgia waxing may not match up with someone else’s.  Some images remain in my mind, some sparkling moments; perhaps a look, a feeling or an anecdote.  That look.  Those shoes.  That dress.  That dizzy feeling.  And it’s from these that I construct in the moment any intelligible meaning that always seems to be drifting away when unattended. 

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Is this the way I always remember it?  Then I say to myself, I remember remembering it this way.  It’s a bit of a reassuring farce because that thought itself is constructed now, in this moment.  The true memory, if there is one, is lost.  Our recall is put together out of these puzzle piece bits each time.  It’s sort of like sketchy cartography, putting together knowledge of the South Pacific from memories of a map.   I could identify some of the dots between New Zealand and Rapa Nui – Pitcairn, the Sandwich and Solomon Islands – but aside from a few distinct names, the thousands of other islands and atolls dotting the archipelagos of Oceania are there, fuzzy, pixelated, existing only in theory somewhere in the enormity of the Pacific.  Places, times … it’s there at the tip of the tongue, but you can’t can’t put your finger on it.  The memory warehouse is dwarfed by the awesome cold power of the oceans of the forgotten.  

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This more or less normal experience of our own memory is, as far as I know, the normal human condition within a few degrees of variance.  What strikes me as amazing is how we don’t find this condition absolutely horrifying on a daily basis. 

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Our autobiographical memory, which is in large measure the basis of our self-concept, is strikingly liquid.  In the lava lamp of our awareness, the present is something of a kind of temporarily cooled and hardened island of magma about to be again presently swept asunder and replaced with a new semisolid present, leaving us to skip from one temporarily hardened island fragment of awareness to another.  And all the while doing this gymnastics of consciousness, tenuously trekking on our known knowns, we’re largely unbothered by the whole feebleness of the project.  I have in my life oceans of time, experiences, relationships, and entire college courses, entire languages, entire years on this planet in which I’ve been drawing breathe that I can hardly account for.

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We need lots of help.  So we can’t seem get enough memory.  We use books, photos, media, to augment our memory.  I could get no writing done without copious note taking, scribbling, doodling, flagging, highlighting and dog earring pages.  These are the breadcrumbs in the forest as far as writing or compiling any body of work.  Memory is the basic task of electronics and computing.  Tapes became floppies became flash drives became clouds.  What is the internet but a repository of uncanny amounts of memory?  The dream of AI, of Data-like androids, is a wish built not only on the perfection of executive functioning – judging, computing, assessing, perceiving – but the need to create a being which would never forget.  Their memory warehouse infinite, never succumbing to the ocean.  

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What if one could remember … well … everything?  It turns out that some very few people can, and report a detailed account of every day of their lives.  Actress Marylou Henner is one of them.  Even forty years later, recall her lines from the seventies and eighties sitcom “Taxi.”  What she has is more remarkable than what we used to call photographic memory.  She has total recall in her memory warehouse, and it’s exceedingly rare.  Neuroscientists studying the phenomenon have identified only ten cases of this condition currently in the world.  If there are more … heh … they’ve been forgotten.

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But before some would-be Frankensteins try to rush in to figure out how they do it so they can do some gene editing to unleash super duper future people with total recall, those with this condition would offer a warning.  But not all of them report happy total recall like Henner.  Others have called it a curse, remembering details of sad feelings and experiences that they cannot shake.  Things they would prefer to forget.  Tragically the memory warehouse holds on.  As much as I envy the total recallers, their warning of a neg recall, a big downer total recall, is well taken.  It’s easy to thank the blessings of remembering, less so the blessings of forgetting.

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Greek mythology tells of the existence of the underworld’s sleep-inducing river of oblivion, Lethe, the root word for lethargy.  The souls of the dead would drink from this river to erase their past lives.  It could be that forgetting is a way of wiping away old wounds and traumas.  Homeric Hymns sang of the blessings and grace of wine to ease the pain of the soul.  The prevalence of some types of drug and alcohol use could be just that – attempts to annihilate the past by either anesthesia or amnesia.  To numb the pain of overwhelming memory.  The risk, and the trade off, is the potential to lose so much more than we meant to in the eroding waters of Lethe.

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Neuroscience indicates that traumatic memories, the hard-coded ones seared into the lizard brain, limbic system, are so tragically fixed as to be beyond the numbing agency of alcohol or other substances.  In addition to providing the courage of loose inhibitions and momentary euphoria, booze does a great job at eroding the withered dendrites contributing to the frontal cortex’s so-called higher faculties.  For the especially heavy drinker, it’s degrading to language, reason, cognition, personality, emotional regulation and finer memory, as the garbled and confused suffers of Korsakoff syndrome – what doctors chillingly call “wet brain” – demonstrate.  But booze as an amnesic agent does a poor job at eradicating the hindbrain’s seared-in memories.  A long term drunk can lose years of memory, but their base reactivities and stereotypes remain like the last husk, the last hanger-on of hollowed out personal character to be defeated by the drink.  The tragedy is that all the booze in the world never healed any traumatic wound.  It just erodes everything else, like sand at the water’s edge, while making the sufferer more and more dependent on the devil’s drink.  

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The clean wipe of painful memory has been something of a fantasy of psychiatry for some time.  Wipe the memory warehouse down and start anew.  (It’s an idea that has bled to pop culture and is the basis of the 2018 Julia Roberts show “Homecoming” – the story revolving around an experiment to wipe the memories of traumatized soldiers.  And another even stranger recent show called “Maniac.”)   

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But this therapeutic use of forgetting traumatic memories goes much further back.  Among early researchers in memory loss as a therapeutic tool was Dr. David Ewen Cameron, a once lauded psychiatrist based in Montreal.  His patients suffered from chronic depression, complex trauma and other painful psychiatric conditions that didn’t respond to traditional talk therapy.  His solution to painful memories was more radical.  Dr. Cameron administered electric shock therapy and LSD to thousands of people – many without their consent – in service to elicit “beneficial brain washing,” or as the doctor preferred to call it, “de-patterning.”  After the hard wipe of memory, the doctor and his team attempted to “re-pattern” the patients with “positive messages.” 

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The intent sounds beneficent – to wipe away suffering and replace it with a positive reconstruction.  But is it true?  Or possible?  Is it only a fantasy?  The key presumption here is the presumption that people’s minds really are soft and flimsy.  It’s the idea that one could even go “inside” and “fix” things like you would if you were renovating a house. 

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It’s a psychiatric idea of this era that had ideological roots in the Cold War.  In the 1950s and 60s the CIA was busy with their own paranoid investigations and promulgation of American propaganda.  Among their many projects, these include published manuals about suspected Soviet brainwashing, (such as Edward Hunter’s book Brainwashing, seen here) and the idea of its terrifying possibility became part of the popular folklore.  The number of spy films this inspired – from The Manchurian Candidate to Salt – has been countless.  But in this brainwash folklore, political dissidents are “brainwashed” or “puppets” for a foreign power.  Normal freedom loving Americans wiped clean and reprogrammed as red assassin bots.  But this just a projection – one that happens to have echoes today among Kremlingate conspiracy theorists.  But in this case it wasn’t the Soviets doing the brainwashing experiments – it was the CIA itself!  The CIA wanted to know if people’s identities can be wiped and then replaced by a new self, and re-educated along the lines of the accepted consensus – that is – for ideological purposes.  If they could harness this power, they could devise an affordable Cold War weapon to subvert the flimsy dissident minds of the communist world.  So here’s the kicker – Dr. Cameron was one of their researchers. 

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Aside from the obvious moral, ethical and political dimensions of this CIA experiment, the ambition of the project could not be understated.  The patients at the time were genuinely suffering and genuinely seeking help.  For them, the promise of Dr. Ewen promised the seeds of a great fantasy, a dream of starting over.  What if we could open possibilities of our character?  It’s one of the pillar stories of psychotherapy.  Within it the urge to be “born again,” or be “rebirthed” is common in not just therapy, but religion.  What new choices would we make if we’re free from the prison of our painful memories?   What “inner character” would be revealed?

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What did Dr. Cameron find in his experiments?  He found it was easy to erase people’s memories with his deep coma-inducing, em-wiping, LSD-tripping hard resets.  But he found it was much, much harder to rebuild people.  And the rebuilt self may have little resemblance to the earlier self.  Some patients report not recognizing their families.  Their childhoods were completely gone.  One woman had to be toilet trained all over again.  Forgetting here is a nightmare because they’ve lost it all.  This wasn’t even useful for the CIA’s nefarious schemes.  We have a fantasy that some “core self,” some true shard of individuality is at the core of a person, but this is just a fantasy.  A kind of homunculus fantasy that presumes at the “core” of “self” there is a kind of tiny version of “you” at the “helm” of your little vessel of electrically charged meat and bone.

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Are deep transformations possible?  Sure they are.  We’ve known this since time immemorial, since the time of the alchemists.  Talk therapy has taught us much so far, and a new frontier of mind-body therapies taking on traumatic memory, (such as Sensorimotor Therapy and EMDR), are forging a new path in the 21st century.  The conversation of memory is shifting however from either “re-membering” or “re-patterning” or “beneficient brainwashing” to new metaphors such as “turning down the volume” on loud unpleasant memories.  This allows one to gain greater agency and independence from their influence. 

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The hope here is to gain a more healthful balance of memory.  The longings for either total recall and total forgetting aside, the ordinary consciousness has its own economy of memory and forgetting.  The ordinary world sips from both rivers Mnemosyne and Lethe, revealing a mixed memory.  It has a perfectly flawed balanced unevenness.  I don’t remember the oceans of time of dull events – monotonous work, long commutes, daily toil, and the third of life spent sleeping.  I usually remember items that were particularly charged with emotion.  Whether despair or exaltation, nadirs or peak experiences.  These points become touchstones of my biographical narrative.  A narrative which itself is free to change and connect dots differently in the future if need be.  They are the salient points, the takeaways, the snapshots.  And no, it’s not objective.  But who – literally who!? – is counting on us being objective?  In a way our normal flawed memory is merciful.  It is frankly it may be all we can bear in this mortal coil.