“But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
Ever have that sort of seemingly senile memory moment where you decide on something, (usually quite insignificant) and then change your mind and decide on something else, but then later when you try and recall your decision, you end up only remembering your first decision? Let me give an example:
Sheila bakes some cookies and starts to plate them to bring to her friend. She decides to keep two for later. Then she changes her mind and decides to just bring the entirety to her friend thinking they will end up eating them together anyway. An hour later, Sheila says to her friend that she has two more she left behind in the kitchen in an attempt to offer her more cookies.
Classic memory glitch. And yes, I am Sheila. I did this today, in fact.
It’s all a matter of short term memory. I stored a quick idea and then added another revised idea. When I thought back to retrieve the idea, I came upon the first one I created and was immediately satisfied. It’s a glitch. The same thing happens when someone loses things around their home, like keys. Trying to recall the last place we set something down versus all the places we’ve set that same item down beforehand is almost like a chronological treasure hunt where each wrong answer may or may not shed light to the next one in a not-so-funny game of slowly losing one’s marbles.
When someone forgets a minor detail, while annoying, it can be overlooked because to err is human. We’ve all been there. Now then, say a person forgets something huge. An important birthday or anniversary. To pick up their child from school. Or perhaps a dark past involving a violent bloody war over the genealogical blood-purity of a tribe. How does forgiveness sort itself out here?
“I didn’t say I survived it,” Dara corrected, his voice curt. “I remember almost nothing of my time as a slave. It’s difficult to be driven insane by memories you don’t have.” – (P. 281, The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty)
The loss-of-memory plot device in stories is both classic and contemporary. When employed brilliantly, we have characters face psychological dilemmas of morality, identity and responsibility. Readers and viewers question their understanding of reality. When employed crudely, we have married adults forgetting they were having an affair with their husband’s younger brother and awkward moments ensue. I was never a fan of soaps, alas.
But there is more than just lost of memory under the microscope here in Chakraborty’s “The City of Brass” (2017). There is the suggestion that accumulating too many memories from living for perhaps too long inevitably leads to madness. Darayavahoush e-Afshin or Dara for short, is a Daeva or Djinn, said to be over fourteen hundred years of age. I can’t even begin to try to imagine how one would keep track of that many moments, that many faces, conversations, impressions, soul crushing life traumas…Perhaps an attempt to do so would only lead to careless accounting of one’s mind. I mean what if you hated someone for centuries, then made up but forgot a few centuries later and just started hating that person again?
A theoretical long-term memory glitch? In a mountain of time, landslides here and there can bury details and emotions into darkness.
In Ishiguro’s “The Buried Giant,” (2015) fabled post-Arthurian lands are continuously blanketed in an eerie mist that keeps long term selective memories at bay. A devoted elderly couple can’t seem to remember what happened to their son and decide to go look for him in a neighboring village. A wandering Saxon warrior aims to slay Querig the dragon, who is the source of the enchanted mist, in efforts to return everyone’s memories and eliminate possible treachery of his foes, the Britons. In true memory-plot-device form, secrets are brought out into the light slowly as the novel progresses with a climax in ultimate Lady of Shalott fashion, endless wretched melancholy.*
Once again the familiar dance of ignorance and bliss echo within the hearts of our heroes and heroines as truths and histories surface like a floating corpse. What does one do when one finds a rotting body? Surely your perspective on life must change and that dead bodies whether figurative or real are better suited to being buried in the earth rather than floating in the water. Maybe we should seriously consider the possibility of altering the phrase to forgive and forget into its more placid reverse: to forget and forgive.
*I truly loved the book if you can’t tell. No really I did.