-P. 33 of Milan Kundera's Ignorance reads,
During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.
We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Émigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena and Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.
-Before I'd ever heard of Derrida, I suspected that repetition was alteration. I'm not thinking of the embellishments or white lies we sometimes throw into anecdotes to amuse an audience. I'm thinking of memoirs, diaries, autobiographies: the writing of memory. When I write about the past, I don't preserve it; I lose it; I experience autobiography as sacrifice. Each written memory is rewritten; its writing requires alterations, details to be discarded or created; and after its writing, I never access the memory as it existed before language. Language covers the memory and hardens around it like a cast: it keeps the memory's shape , but also, until we confuse the cast with what it covers, hides it from view.
-In the quoted passage, Kundera explains how nostalgia can coexist with a shambled memory of nostalgia's object. But it also hints at a relationship between nostalgia and memory: "During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing." The passage, though, only explains nostalgia's inability to "awaken recollections," and doesn't propose a logic by which to understand memory and nostalgia's incompability.
-When I was younger, and tests were, in the soap opera of my life, a cast regular, I memorized things easily. As long as I'd read the right chapters, even if I only read them during lunch the day of the test, I'd do fine. (I noticed that my smartest friends also learned the material as it was being taught in class, but I could never keep myself focused on a lecture. My attention easily got snagged on large spirals of thoughts: stories I was working on, or body aches from sleep deprivation, or recurring daydreams about crushes. And at some point in high school I decided to allow myself to disengage instead of trying to concentrate, but always failing.) I never forgot anything I read, and if I'd (on a rare occasion) read a text twice, I could recite it. But my memory for things I'd read was strictly short-term; I had trouble recalling the names of books I'd read six months before, or what my thesis had been for papers I'd written in the previous schoolyear. On the other hand, while I could never focus long enough on a lecture to really "hear" it, my long-term memory for conversations was, and still is, quite good. I can't remember names or places, but I usually remember every phrasing and idea.
-When we talk, my ex tells me that he misses me. But, even if my life were different enough to accomodate romantic feelings for him, he'd know better than to expect me to say those words back to him. My ex and I dated for three years; for two of those years, we dated long-distance, and during that time we both realized that I have what could be called "emotional amnesia." I rarely miss people, even the people I love; I only feel nostalgia for the seasons; and when my current, also long-distance, boyfriend commented the other day that he fears, when we're apart, my love for him becomes a(n albeit happy) commitment rather than a feeling, he was partly right. My emotions for a person far away quickly turn abstract, more a collection of facts than feelings. I've known this about myself for a while, but am still saddened by it; I spend most of my time alone in my apartment, adrift in a present tense, with the past I departed from appearing as mirage.
-My ex has a horrible memory for conversations, but misses people strongly. So how is it that I so rarely can recall my feelings for people, despite recalling so much more about them? Does nostalgia, as Kundera suggested, inhibit memory? And can clear recollection preclude nostalgia?
-In a sense, I do feel nostalgia for more than the seasons: I feel nostalgia for all I can't remember.
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UPDATE (April 24, 2004): blog.onemonkey.org summarizes and comments on Susan Engel's Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory. Quoting from the post:
We change our stories depending on our audience, and our internal 'veridicial' version is a patchwork of associations to other locations and events, scripted by common schemas and recurring highly stylised storylines and characters who turn into stereotypes, all of it overlayed by certain ineffable emotional traces and scents.In my post's second paragraph, I didn't mean to suggest that a memory is ever undistorted or "authentic." But I do think writing makes the distortion painfully visible. When I try to access a memory I've written about, my memory is colored by the writing; so, I can't ever entertain the pleasing notion that memory is a window onto the past, instead of a drawing cut to the window's dimensions and pasted over it.
Everytime we think we are remembering a certain episode, we are actually rewriting our autobiographies to suit our present. So we should be wary of making our memory the foundation stone of our personal narrative and we should be even more wary of therapy that reaches back into our childhoods to find the cures for our neuroses. Certainly we can find evidence and enlightenment of our present mental states in our stories of the past, but we cannot find its causes, the cures. And laying the blame on ghosts will only continue the hauntings.
For the past day, I've been returning to Pico Iyer's "In the Realm of Jet Lag," unable to finish it. It's barely a page, and is simply written. But when words excite me my impulse is to back away, breathe, calm down before returning to them. Sometimes this also occurs with films; I press pause and pace my room, pleasure as likely as pressure to distress my heart rate. My body regresses to the Victorian era, "the age of nerves" (Vicente Huidobro, “Ars Poetica"), in which nervousness could still exhibit aesthetic sensitivity.
(Related: This morning, OGIC posted about her slowness reading Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. "…Every second or third sentence seems to contain some startlingly astringent perception about no less sweeping a subject than human nature, or love, or women, or men … Is it possible to compare something to quicksand and mean it as praise?")
Usually, it's a text's language that over-stimulates me. But in the case of "In the Realm of Jet Lag," it's the subject.
A day, a human day, has a certain shape and structure to it; a day, in most respects, resembles a room in which our things are ordered according to our preference. It may be empty or it may be full, but in either case it is familiar. Over here is the place where you rest (10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps), over there is the place where you eat or work or feel most alive. You know your way around the place so well, you can find the bathroom in the dark. But under jet lag, of course, you lose all sense of where or who you are. You get up and walk toward the bathroom and bang into a chair. You reach toward the figure next to you and then remember that she's 7,000 miles away, at work. You get up for lunch, and then remember that you have eaten lunch six times already. You feel almost like an exile, a fugitive of sorts, as you walk along the hotel corridor at 4 a.m., while all good souls are in their beds, and then begin to yawn as everyone around you goes to work. The day is stretched and stretched, in this foreign world of displacement, till it snaps.My days lack any familiar shape, each day starting and stopping at a different time. I have no habits, and no way of keeping track of myself. A couple months ago, I tried:
Friday:woke up at eleven or midnight, went to bed at about 9 am, didn't fall asleep until 3 pm or later on Saturday. Slept until 2 am on Sunday. Don't remember when I went to bed on Sunday -- early evening, I think. Woke up in the early am on Monday and was exhausted by the afternoon.Last night (Sunday), I fell asleep by 10 pm and woke up at 4 am. Saturday night, or Sunday morning, I slept from 7 am to 9 am. Earlier on Saturday, I'd had my Friday's night sleep.