What a gift it is to have been blessed with a bad memory. I have a good forgetory as my father in law used to say. I say I am blessed as I shall explain later but it is a curse as well. Huge swathes of my life have been eradicated, wiped from my hard drive or archived somewhere deep down to be recalled at a future date in an unexpected moment. Whole periods of my life are lost, people’s names and faces have been cast to the winds and there are countless things I’ve apparently done which I can no longer recall. My friends tell me that I used to take the train to school with a class mate, let’s call him John Rutherford, for four years but I cannot bring him to mind at all, at least not naturally. I’ve started to create a false John in my mind, an avatar made up of all of the things that I’ve pieced together from the various descriptions of him, blond curly hair, quite tall, steel rimmed glasses hiding his memorable (not to me) blue eyes. I’ve even googled him, tried to find him on Facebook or Twitter but to no avail, there are just too many John Rutherfords and nothing has piqued my conscience.
I am blessed though in that there is a beauty in having a bad memory in that I don’t need to remember things that have actually happened, I‘ve been able to fill the void with faux events, fantastical fables and tricks of the mind which could never have happened in reality. For example I can see myself in my own memories and I know that that cannot be true. I can see myself being dragged back to a party by my irate mother for not having said thank you, I must have been about four. I can see the disappointment on my face as my black Creole balloon drifts upwards over my old house, floating away and disappearing forever. I lived there up to the age of seven. I can see my self standing proudly on the rocks at the edge of the sea at Warkworth looking out over the incoming tide, hands on my hips, shirt off and the wind playing with my hair but I am fifty metres away. I can see myself lying unconscious at the roundabout at Deuchar Park having fallen nastily off my bicycle.
Some of these memories are of bad things and some have been of good things but none of these memories are mine in that they could not have happened or at least I could not have seen them but undoubtedly they belong to me and me alone. The blessing is that I can screen these memories and replace actual events with my own edited version.
I will never know if these memories are more or less real than some of the other memories I have, it is just that they defy logic, I can be certain that they did not happen as I remember them. It could well be though that all of our memories are unreal, fabricated by our minds which cut and paste events to make a good and easily recognised story. Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable as the mind re-jigs information all of the time to try and make it fit into some sort of standard template. Do we indeed remember anything real at all?
I’m going to stick with what I know, my memories are not real but that doesn’t matter because I was the one that made them all up.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 