When he wrote Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust was trying to capture the essence of events that no longer existed except in his memories of them. He wanted to articulate the day-to-day feeling and evoke the sensations that had once been so real to him, the link between Sacred Memory and the Present Moment. He would tap into moments in time through his recollection of sights and scents and sounds. The resonance of memory for him lay not just in the moment that was being retrieved, but in the process and reason used to initiate the act of remembering. By the very immersion in scenes from his life, Proust was revising and coloring them from where he was as he wrote down the words describing the elusive past. Like the details of the Vermeer paintings he recalled, he wanted to apprehend again the detailed experience of all he had once known, but he could not be sure he had grasped what it was.
Our creativity with memory is inevitable, for we are all drawn over and over again to new versions of the visual and tangible effects of the memories we hold. Each memory cannot be accessed by us without our changing its content and form at once. This is an ongoing, familiar process that we each experience, with the result that both traumatic and joyful events, in time, are most often perceived very differently from the original event.
There is a subtle and curious element inherent in how Proust titles his work. He chose the title of his collective series of books from an English poem, Sonnet XXX by Shakespeare. When Proust translated it, the title became A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, literally meaning “In Search of Lost Time.” With such a title, he moves away from Shakespeare’s intention and exploration of memory, and defines what is central in his own thought and heart. For Proust is not only trying to remember what happened from his earliest years—he is also mourning the loss of memories he may not be able to recover, and for moments in time that are never to be known again.
Memory and Truth
Memory serves not only as the source of inspiration for Proust, but also as the source of his frustration. Nothing has stayed as it was. How is it possible, he is asking, for us to hold on to anything if our memory cannot grasp it fully? How then is truth to be discerned? If the memories are truth, what kind of truth do they express and allow? And how then can they change over time, and still be seen as valid? The answer can be offered that truth lies in the moment, always. We have only the Now. We can accept the idea readily that in any brief moment, in its duration before we begin the selective interpretation we always do offer to experience, there is essential validity, just because we are there. But what then does memory provide? Is it giving back the pure duration, or the almost instantaneous interpretation? And if the memory is already being converted into something else, does that mean our recollection in reality is wrong, as Proust worried?Or is this process much more elusive? Can we name this curious need we all have to shape memory, for good or ill?
Yes, if we consider the significance of resonance by analogy. In music, resonance is a force effected by the action of parts upon one another. Resonance offers a way to understand the sounds that hold a greater complexity, but our role in interpreting the sounds lies less in an objective appraisal than an emotional perception. We sense the combinations that echo off one another, the fugue-like interplay of pitch and intonation. We don’t have to analyze it, though we are free to do that if we want. But if we do, something will no doubt be lost. Some essential meaning will be corrupted, changed, and the evolution and resolution of the music will shift accordingly in the observer’s inner space. It is the same with memory. It is the very elusive combination of recollections that defines the memory, and affects us the most.
Moments in Time
In The Four Quartets, in the exquisite “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot writes:
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time.
But only in time can the moment in the
rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”
Memory collects these moments for us, fulfills it through the resonance of what Eliot names. Memory collapses time, plays with it, and abandons it. Or it can pin us in a single image forever unchanged, something that for some individual reason is still as vivid as with our first experience of it, impressed upon us as if our physical self were stamped with it, and forever we share space with it.
Memory creates an alternate world, is in essence a presentation of anomalous experience, if by that we mean the experience of the unexpected, an uncertain process in which the smell of rain or the sudden sight of a child running down a sidewalk can return to us a field of images from long ago, unbidden. It takes us away from our normal world, from whatever we happen to be doing at any given time, and we enter another realm, however briefly. What are the effects of this? Who is to say, too, that the remembered world is not as real as the one we call “normal?” And again, if that memory changes in any way, in our attitude toward it, in the specificity with which we recall details, does it become then a distortion of the original experience, or does it clarify that experience for us?
What do we know of each other, except through our memories of shared time, and the bias of recollection we give to that. What changes us, if not a revision of those memories? Or is it that the memories change because we do?
In our contemporary world, our scientists are the usually accepted arbiters of truth. Yet they cannot use their tools to acquire objective knowledge of intangibles like memory. As human beings, they make assumptions based on premises as vulnerable to alteration as there are individuals creating them. Like the measurement of light, our experience is always altered by our perception of it. So does it occur for the deep processes that engage us through memory.
We Choose What We Remember
In Chapter 6 of his book The Psychology of Anomalous Experience, Graham Reed discusses the context by which the same behavior is seen as pathological or as acceptable in a society. It is an intriguing chapter, especially on the subject of how we deploy attention, and how that affects our perception from a narrow or larger view. A similar theme was explored by Castenada in his trilogy of Don Juan, though in a more metaphysical way. And this is exactly how memory functions—a selection of events to which we pay attention in a specific way defines our perception of reality—because we dwell on them, or because we ignore them, or because they inexorably draw us to them. Memory, and therefore perception, changes when we resolve hidden patterns, or cross inner boundaries, or deny something traumatic or painful that we have experienced, or clarify into wisdom some part of ourselves.
What is existence if not a complex of alternate worlds created by and within memory? It is through memory that we return to those worlds. Yet, of course, memory is shaped unendingly by every present moment. Try to hold time an instant, feel and experience all sight and sound and nuance of sensation and perception for a single moment, consciously, by giving it our complete and utter attention—focus, concentrate on this—and the act of doing so sings us into the present fully, and for a fleeting fraction of our experience we know that we are eternal in manifestation, and enter experience as the mystics do. Poets call it epiphany. It is what Wordsworth is describing in his poem “Intimations of Immortality.” It is what a true seer brings into vision. It is a gift we can recover with memory.
The past leaves us only our remembering. We live attempting, like Proust, to hold it, relinquish it, reconcile with it, or celebrate it. We cannot live well without memory. And sometimes, we cannot live well with memory. It does not exist objectively, but it occupies our mind and heart far beyond our ability to measure its location. Its effect is in continuous flux. And at the same time, that memory contains all that we have known, all those epiphanies. It is more than a reflection of what we choose to remember. It is essential to us, and weighted with meaning.
A memory can also be a consuming event, a word, a glance, a perceived implication that we cannot release. To the end of his days, Charles Dickens was haunted by the memory of hearing his mother express enthusiasm for him to return to work at the blacking house at age ten: “She was warm to have me go.” He didn’t manage to describe it in his creative work until later in life, in David Copperfield. The memory even then was not exorcised for him. In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov wrote lyrically of pre-war Russia and winter in St. Petersburg and watching the plays of Chekhov on a country evening. He wanted to retrieve a lost world, a pre-war society he loved, and he could not bear its passing.
The Power of Memory and Life Purpose
We know, too, that memories are the reason emotional traumas continue to exist, the intangible location where desperate scenes are re-enacted, and in fact, without our recollection of events, whether they are subsumed in consciousness or available for us to witness, the emotional scars would no longer possess us, could have no hold, for they very likely no longer have any tangible parallel in our day-to-day reality. We could say, for the same reason, that war is the result of remembering the past, that in fact it is because we remember history that we are doomed to repeat it. There are civil wars that have lasted in Ireland, in India and Pakistan, in Israel and Palestine, enmities between people of similar roots, whose original conflicts may have been quite real and tangible once. But subsequent generations who perpetuate those wars do not have access to memories of a world before, one without violence and betrayal. Their memories define their knowledge of the future, and the cycle never ceases—there are no good memories to retrieve any more, and so only the emotions of vengeance and pride and hatred can take their place.
If memory is so individual and elusive, if it cannot be measured with the exactness of a distant galaxy or a chemical imbalance in the body’s system, is it then in some form an illusion? Can memory even be shaped, in fact, without illusion, without some self-deception and misinterpretation or misrepresentation of “reality?” How can this be decided? And if illusion is present, does that remove the possibility of truth? Trying to answer this is futile, for any observer asking the question already lives within the same perceptual paradigm, holds another set of memories that color what he or she thinks they see or understand about anyone. As the Spanish film director Luis Bunuel once said, “our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.”
Memories In the Present Moment
We create memories all our lives, and witness their transformation again and again, dependent on our world view and the level of integration we allow for the experiences to surface. Perhaps our co-existence with memory is part of the soul’s journey. Perhaps our spirit cannot grow, and our hearts cannot feel, and our minds cannot be transformed, without the Creative Force that memory apprehends for us.
Perhaps our wisdom lies in eventually allowing ourselves to experience memory without censorship, allowing ourselves to see everything, to yield control of the unknown. Perhaps, if it leads to the experience of a full integration of mind and heart and soul, we move closer to the Source, to the Light.
And perhaps if the present moment were not so ephemeral, if we did not have knowledge that it would end, it would not be so precious. Memory is our access to knowing this, and the knowing is emotional in basis, and sacred. It cannot be separated out or compartmentalized, though we try to do this, often insist we can. Memory is the emotional aspect of our being that tells us who we are. It is the changing patterns of memory that tell us who we have become now.
And Now is all we have. In the present moment we exist as the whole energy of our being. There is no other way possible. We are in each moment our whole selves, and meant to live in awareness of this.
