Open Writing

Nothing can be more deceptive than memory. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who specialised in childhood development, believed that he could remember everything that had happened to him when he was still a toddler. He wrote of a particular incident: 'I was sitting in my pram while my nurse was pushing me in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me. Meanwhile my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. A crowd gathered and the man took to his heels.’

What is interesting about this account is that it isn’t true. Nevertheless, Piaget believed in that scene until he was almost adult.

Which leads me to wonder how many of our memories are real and how many are mere tricks of the imagination. Can we trust our memories? If only our better ones could be bottled like perfume or good wine. Perhaps this is the only way we could ensure that they not become transformed in the rethinking and retelling.

Historians are well aware of the unreliability of memory. They know how easy it is to distort personal and public experience so we always seem better, more honourable than we really are. War is the ultimate distortion of truth. The victor inevitably describes those events in strongly moral terms. Basically, our minds want to remember our good experiences and forget the bad. If only we could effect our own frontal lobotomies and forcibly cut them away. If only we could clean-sweep our hard disks and begin again.

Perhaps unfairly, I have always tended to divide people into two distinct groups; those who are able to live in the immediate present and are not troubled too much by the past, and those that are constantly plagued by it. Because much of my writing is focussed at children, I live somewhere in a no man's land between those two camps. On the one hand I must strive to remember exactly what it was like to be eight-years-old. To be ten, twelve, and sixteen. At the same time, I must feel what it is like to be those same ages in the immediate present, otherwise my writing will have little relevance for its intended audience. To add another complication: because of the length of time between writing and publishing, I have to avoid anything that smacks too much of the 'here and now'. Nothing dates a piece of writing more quickly than pop groups, clothes and certain colloquialisms.

Yet it is those same clothes and music that bring back the feelings we associate with being a particular age. If I hear 'Begin the Beguine', I am again a small child. Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five' plunges me into my twenties. Hearing and smell, those most evocative of the senses will invariably recall the past. But how accurate are they? And does it really matter? All I know is that the smell of freshly cooked chicken soup plunges me back to my very earliest years when I could tricycle down our street looking forward to what the next day would bring.

How wonderful to be able to relive a time when everything was fresh and new. And sometimes how convenient. When my mother slid into old age and senility, she would recall her youth in Poland in a kind of semi-song. Not for her the ignominious present in the Nursing Home where she suffered painful bedsores. No, instead her memories returned her to when she was a pretty sixteen year-old exploring the pine forests of her youth. It is hard to imagine how awful her last days would have been without her mind drifting into that regression.

Which returns me to the vagaries of memory. You can trust your memory, can't you? So how about those keys you know you left in a particular spot and then they disappeared. Or the title of that film or book? Or that person's name? Presently, only proper nouns continue to elude me. By the time I lose the common ones, I hope that modern medicine will have come up with a satisfying remedy that I remember to take.

© Goldie Alexander