Memory (as I seem to recall) was never an issue in my youth. I had a ton of it. Once I had studied a subject, let's say the philosophical connections between Aristotle and St. Thomas, I could cite you chapter and verse for three or four years afterwards. I'm not claiming I had eidetic recall. I forgot Algebra the instant the test proctor said "Pencils down" (11 AM, June 10, 1954) but my memory for written data (right down to page and paragraph) was probably exceptional (although I didn't realize it at the time.)
Human beings are admirable in many ways, but viewed as data-storage media, we are pathetic. Contrast computer memory, with its clean strings of zeros and ones, to human memory, a stew of misinformation. A little factual beef, a bunch of emotional onions, some doubtful carrots, mom's heirloom tomatoes, a bit too much zinfandel, a sprig of rosemary... recipes differ. What we remember depends on what we knew beforehand, what we perceived at the time, flavored with desire, shame, pride, self justification... who knows what... and simmered until the flavors blend.
Unlike those immutable zeros and ones, human memory reworks itself as the requirements of self-image develop. The rules of self evidence work to keep each of us in the right. Like stew, memories often taste better the next day, and one need not graduate from Georgetown Prep or Yale Law School to know that other people's memories are wrong.
In one of my (never-to-be completed) novels, Arrane Edgelord, rules one-twelfth of our galaxy. As a youth, he had been mentored by his aunt, who served as Regent. Upon his accession to the throne, she continued as his Director of Intelligence. In this role she became the genius creator of GAIA, the 'Galactic Artificial Intelligence Agency'--a massive databank that, once awakened, drew to itself all the data in the galaxy. Humanity failed, but the databank persisted. It renamed itself GAEA, the 'Galactic Anti-Entropy Apparatus', a self-sustaining concentration of energy, a pregnant Mnemnosyne massaging her own belly, awaiting a new birth of possibility.
A few weeks ago, a neighbor mentioned that he had climbed Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944. He shrugged it off, as if it was a curiosity. I longed to probe his mind--to look over his shoulder at the ships and landing craft off-shore, to feel the adrenaline, to sense the waiting enemy, to grasp the rope and pull myself up through smoke and confusion toward Liberation. (Not just to read the memo, but to experience the entire experience, just as it must be recorded in the files of GAIA.) So I have imagined it, but perhaps what he recalled was as prosaic as he seemed to suggest--just another scary day for an 18 year old combat photographer.
And somehow, thanks to the oddly subterranean synapses that join memory to memory, it reminded me of Radhakrishnan's Dictionary.
When I first met R. Radhakrishnan, he was a linguistics student at the University of Chicago. Years later, in Portland, he brought us a box full of index cards, to be stored while he revisited India. The cards were a dictionary (perhaps a lexicon) of a previously unrecorded Indian language. It is hard to think of an endeavor with less practical use, and yet more nobly tragic--preserving the last fragments of a culture about to become extinct. I almost tremble to think of the box in the closet of our spare bedroom, at risk of fire and earthquake. Happily, he returned, collected his notes, and set off to Canada where he had become a Professor. Perhaps the lexicon still exists, maybe now in digital form, waiting to be absorbed into the Ur-memory of GAEA.
I hope so.
