Image Credits- Jiri Rezac Photography
We have all heard phrases like ‘Live in the moment’ or ‘Embrace the now’ and like all the simplified affirmations, these are not to be taken literally. However, if we were to take the meaning of these literally we would not have an experience of life but rather an experience really close to death. Clive Wearing, an extreme and chronic case of amnesia who has been suffering anterograde and retrograde memory loss and is unable to remember anything beyond a period of 7 to 30 seconds, describes his life as, “Can you imagine what it’s like to have one night 20 years long with no dream? That’s what it’s been like. Just like death. No difference between day and night, no thoughts at all.”
Clive Wearing is an English musician. As an expert on the works of Orlande de Lassus, he had already built up a musical career with the BBC until he was infected at the age of 46 with the herpes simplex virus. This effectively destroyed his hippocampus and left him profoundly amnesic. Now he, largely, only has his semantic memory (which is the memory for enduring facts about the world like the capital of England or his birthdate and the knowledge of the English language) and procedural memory (long-term memory that stores how to perform tasks, such as riding a bike or playing the piano in his case). However, his episodic memory (which is a personal record of the past) is severely impaired. Therefore, he knows what a diary is, but he doesn’t have any memory of writing a diary ever, though he writes it every day. As his wife- Deborah- says, “He knows about things, he knows that he worked for the BBC, but he does not have any event in his mind that he can bring to his mind’s eye. He knows that we are marriede does not remember the wedding.”
Hence, he can still play the piano perfectly as before, however, he is incapable of reading a book (as he forgets the sentence before last) or making new memories. He is continually under the impression that he has just woken up, or recovered from being dead. Every moment for him is the first moment of consciousness and his diary (kept by him for more than 20 years) - filled with entries such as “I am Alive”, “I am Awake/ truly awake/ perfectly awake” an attempt to record the true moment of awakening or consciousness - is an evidence of that. It makes sense that his diary is filled with these entries minute-by-minute, line after line because for him every moment is the first moment of consciousness and therefore he is always in the present. However it is poignantly ironic that this perpetual consciousness is the reason why he is no more conscious, he is no more the Clive Wearing that he was before. His son says “There’s a tiny fraction of him left now.” The perpetual ‘now’ has robbed him of the essential ‘was’ and ‘will’ and without any anchor, Clive floats in the perpetual stream of conscious-unconsciousness.
What this case study points out is the importance of memory in all of its aspects in our lives. Our memory shapes us and makes us who we are. Whether our memories trouble us and haunt us, or make us happy and replenish us, either way, they define us. Similar is also the case with collective memory (a theory that believes that there exists a shared pool of memories, knowledge, and information of a social group). Though institutions (such as nations, governments, the church, or a firm) and groups do not “have” a memory like individuals do (as there is no equivalent to the neurological system that we individuals possess) still these larger social groups "make" one for themselves with the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, images, texts, ceremonies, places, and monuments. Together with such a memory, these groups and institutions "construct" an identity. The word “construction” implies that much is in the hands or forces of people holding power and therefore a collective memory is necessarily a mediated memory. It is backed up by material media, symbols, and practices which have to be grafted into the hearts and minds of individuals. Therefore the school textbooks, the narratives that historians portray, the narrative that media portrays (or is allowed to portray), and many such things matter because collective memory is ultimately shaped by them, and our individual memory and collective memory are intrinsically linked.
Image Credits - Amazon
Aleida Assmann in her essay "Transformations between History and Memory" talks about the "memory boom" in which activists, artists, film producers, politicians, citizens, media magnets, and many other experts are engaged in the common enterprise of reconstructing and shaping the past. Until now there was a widespread conviction that while humans change over time, the past does not. We conceived it to be beyond our control, however, this commonsense fact has been questioned and also reversed. Whereby until just recently people were convinced of the fact that the past was closed and fixed with the future being open and changeable, we realize now that the past seems to be in constant revision and the future is overwhelmingly determined by the past. We can, thus, see in our political situations today that the past is not safely locked in history books and stowed away in libraries but continuously reclaimed as an important source for power and identity politics. History is not merely a phenomenon that comes long after politics; it has itself become the stuff and fuel of politics. Emblematic in this situation is a description in George Orwell's novel 1984: describing the meticulous labor invested by the state in suppressing and changing documents that contradict the unified voice of power in the present.
Memory and history– two terms closely intertwined and sometimes used synonymously have two distinct and also overlapping meanings. Memory has a history and history is itself a form of memory. However, while Memory bridges the gap between the past, present, and future, history separates them. While memory is characterized by its selective nature (you do not remember everything about everything that has happened to you) history has no scope for forgetfulness, it pays impartial attention to the event and records it. Abstract and generalized "history" is collectively "remembered" and reembodied when history is made into forms of shared knowledge and collective experience. Here, "history in general" is refashioned into a concrete and emotionally charged version of "our history" and absorbed as part of collective identity. While collective participation in national memory is enforced in totalitarian states coercively through indoctrination and propaganda, in democratic states it is circulated by way of popular media, discourse, and forms of "liberal representation." Historians can play contrary roles: they can support the play of political power or question it; or they can become architects or critics of constructions of national memory.
But what we, as conscious beings, should always remember is that we are what we think, and what we think is not merely the present. The past is important and so is the construction of a probable future. And as much as we are shaped by the collective spirit of our society it is important that we do not forget ourselves. All comes secondary; the very minimum is that we are anchored to our core self and the rope of consciousness, whether loose, taut, or in-between, is not broken.
By Prachiti
Prachiti is a student of English Literature at Hindu College (University of Delhi). She is passionate about Literature, Languages and how they shape the world around us. In her free time she reads novels or muses about philosophical or psychological ponderings and sometimes does both simultaneously.
References-
1.Mental Time Travel and the Shaping of the Human Mind: Thomas Suddendorf, Donna Rose Addis and Michael C. Corballis
2.Transformations between History and Memory: Aleida Assmann
3.The Man With The Seven-Second Memory (Documentary- Youtube) - Real Stories)
4.Forever Today book by Deborah Wearing
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