Went to dinner with an old friend tonight and we talked about memory. She lived in London for several months this year and left her wife for a few weeks to go to Paris by herself. She wanted to visit Paris and to think of her mother, who died recently. Paris was her mother’s favorite city and they had spent a lot of time there together. So this time she wandered through the city thinking about her mother, remembering her, speaking with her. She told me: “Casi caminé por toda la ciudad.” It was a lovely image, using space and memory to feel close to someone who is gone. I told her that I don’t know how I will feel about my mother when she dies. All my recollections of her, which are after all just afterimages of my experiences with her, are conflicted, ambivalent, and often bitter. But who knows? The future turns us all into fools.
Taylor Swift has created a flowering garden of songs about love, memory, and loss. She’s amazing. Her sincerity, in this insincere age, is always moving. In “All Too Well” she revisits the images of a relationship that has ended. And it’s the specificity of it which gives the song its pathos. The glasses, the twin sized bed, the tee ball team; these details ground the song. But at the same time the generality of it— not the stuff that sounds cinematic (driving in a convertible in the falling autumn leaves) and so feels a little artificial— the generality of the pain of memory itself: “I remember it all too well.” It’s painful because it is so beautiful. All the things that had meant so much turned meaningless by the end of the relationship. It’s a curse to remember things like that.
Which is different from what Modest Mouse says about the desire to forget: “I’ve done some things I want to forget but I can’t.” This speaks so much to me. All the things I’ve done that I’m too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about. That, because I can’t undo them, I wish I could not remember them. This is another kind of curse. To carry with you your shame in a place where no one can see it but that you can never forget is there.
In Yo, El Supremo a character says: “El hombre de buena memoria no recuerda nada porque no olvida nada” (A man who has a good memory doesn’t remember anything because he doesn’t forget anything.) The characters in this novel are extraordinarily smart but also full of shit and given to speaking in sophistries so I don’t really know how seriously the reader is supposed to take this statement. But I have thought a lot about it in the last couple of weeks. I’m given to saying that I have a memory like a steel trap. I say that because it’s a cliché that makes me laugh and because I sort of believe it. My head is full of memories. But maybe this isn’t remembering at all. Maybe it’s because all the things I like to recall, and all the memories I don’t like thinking about, and all the things I can’t forget are always just there.
