In class, we have been discussing memory as an unreliable narrative; as memory itself occurs as a “way of forgetting”. Why I am so hung up with this is because memory’s a central component in why oral traditions formed, why books are produced, why people share poetry, how people learn to speak, live, act. And it’s inextricably linked to forgetting. It’s an incredibly mysterious thing to me that we (individually/collectively) are not built to construct an accurate narrative of all things though it would do us no good anyway, due to memory’s permutability. Such as ... how obliteration of a memory occurs in narrative recapping. In explaining what I mean by that here's an anecdote: I normally forget the content of my dreams, because I don’t need them to survive. I read somewhere that dreams are constructed to consolidate memories. In the effort to remember, I started recording my dreams in a journal. In writing down the contents, I produce an act: I’m aiming to fit words to convey what had happened; I translate. Once I’m using the medium of language, though, the narrative starts to abide by its rules - I would have to name things, and reveal the nature of the things being named, while, as discussed in lecture, “stimuli encodes differently when language is absent.” And as those images in my dream’s narrative are a kind of language, they are the kind that babies probably have before they get the hang of speaking - because there’s still something incommunicable, and insufficiently placed through mere words - but in order to fit, the attempt it produces results in a false memory that tries to make sense in the narrative. This is kind of cool, but it only becomes very interesting when the effort of remembering/forgetting is applied to living, waking experiences; and I’ll realize that a memory, a photograph, a recollection of events, past-stuff, are also comprised of details just as fallible.
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