another point on memory

I’ve also been catching up (on Facebook) with a good friend from high school. In 1988 we both spent the summer working at a Lake Erie resort near Cleveland, and we’ve been trading stories from that period– there are literally hundreds of hilarious things that happened that summer (I make an oblique tongue-in-cheek reference to that fact in Tool-Being; some might remember the passage, but look in the index for Stonewall Jackson if you don’t remember– same paragraph as Stonewall).

In any case, during this dicussion my friend and I have both had occasion to say: “I forgot about that!”

This is one of my favorite phrases to think about. Because on the one hand, when you say “I forgot about that!” it’s not strictly speaking true, because if you had really forgotten about it then your friend wouldn’t be capable of reminding you of it. And on the other hand, a literal reading of this phrase could imply that anything not currently in your mind is something that you’ve forgotten.

And yet, that’s not what we mean when we use the phrase, which would be a good candidate for phenomenological analysis. When someone tells us something that makes us say “I forgot about that!”, what we seem to mean is that we had lost free, independent access to that memory. If I had been daydreaming about the summer of 1988 and its gallery of wild human characters, I would never have remembered incident X if my friend had never reminded me of it.

Some of the stories he’s told me are ones that I fully remembered by myself, even if I hadn’t thought of them in many years. Those stories are more of a “sharing between old friends” sort of experience. But then there is another class of stories where the relationship is asymmetrical, because one of the friends is dependent on the other one for triggering the memory. It feels like a wall is being broken down in your brain, and a sense of shock or surprise occurs. You suddenly recall that, yes, that did happen. But it feels a bit cloudy at first, because someone else is guiding you through it.

In fact, a geographical metaphor is probably the most appropriate one. I know Zamalek pretty well, and can of course wander freely through it by myself. But once in awhile someone shows me something new, or I enter a house I have never entered before. A few days ago, some out-of-town visitors (readers of my books) wanted me to come over to the President Hotel to meet them for breakfast. It’s about a 7-minute walk from my place, and I’ve been into the hotel countless times for various reasons. But never before did I have reason to eat breakfast there, and the 10th floor view of Zamalek was stunning.

I mention this because the new breakfast view from the hotel had a similar feel to the “I forgot about that!” scenario. Both refer to situations that are not entirely strange, but somehow out of our normal space of free imaginative access. Both feel slightly shocking– like being punched, or tripping and falling on the sidewalk.