Memory fascinates me – perhaps because mental illness robbed me of it for the longest time, only for it to hit me with full force around the time I turned thirty. Is this what most people have? Being overwhelmed by every incident that ever happened to you playing in your brain all at once? Is this why people can be so fucking annoying sometimes? Anyway, one side effect is that I’m more distrustful of memory, seeing how it’s warped from the actual experience. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a story about being kicked off a jury because he pointed out that eye-witness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence; this is interesting, given my understanding that eye-witness testimony is also one of the most reliable forms of persuasion.
I have some personal, definitive proof of Tyson’s claim. One of the most famous lines of dialogue in The Shield is when Detective Kavanaugh, during his investigation into protagonist Vic Mackey and his crimes, throws his suspicions about a recent heist right in his face. Vic retorts: “Let me remind you of a few things you seem to have forgotten. I didn’t kill Terry. You’ve lost your leverage over Lem. And your ex-wife’s pussy… tastes like sweet butter.” Now, I initially recalled Vic delivering the line with a massive smirk on his face, but in actuality he’s frowning the entire time, putting every ounce of contempt into each word.
This was a good lesson about the unreliability of memory; I suspect I was retroactively projecting my joy at the line onto Vic. It almost makes me wonder what the point of memory even is; I’ve read that the only actually reliable form of memory is muscle memory, something we don’t actively think about. In that case, why do we only remember things how we want to remember them? I’m told that one extremely effective form of therapy for cPTSD is memory retraining, in which a bad memory is essentially ‘rewritten’ into a better one. Perhaps the memories we have are less factual descriptions of our past and more signifiers of our identity – history, in other words.
Do you have any stories about remembering or misremembering works?
