Unintended Memories
15 September 2009
Tuesday
There was a time when I wanted to bring back something tangible from travel; I sought souvenirs. But I am no longer concerned with souvenirs. The only souvenirs I brought back from Norway were five small rocks I collected on the southern coast. So I did bring something tangible back with me, though not a souvenir in the usual sense. The only things that I now desire from travel are experiences, memories, pictures and words. These four are tightly bound together: the pursuit of experiences yields memories, and memories are evoked by photographs and written accounts of the event.
A butterfly sitting on a flower in Sand, Norway. (photo credit: Laura Nielsen)
I have often thought that if I could keep only one thing from a journey I would keep the notes I take while traveling, for nothing else quite evokes the memory of what one has seen like an account written while events unfold. Many is the time I have read my old travel journals and been reminded of details that I had completely forgotten, and would not have remembered but for the written account. And I have always enjoyed picking people up at the airport when they return from traveling in order to hear the stories they have to tell while the memory is still fresh in their minds.
A bee sitting on a flower in Froger Park, Oslo.
If, as Ortega y Gasset has said, and as I have repeatedly quoted him as saying, that man has not an essence but a history, then it is memory that preserves and sustains that history, and memory is the only thing that can be our guide to the next-best-thing to the missing essence of humanity, the human nature that we may or may not have.
José Ortega y Gasset (09 May 1883 to 18 October 1955)
Travel, in a certain sense, is the conscious and explicit cultivation of memory. But memory is complex and even elusive. As we know, Proust made memory the centerpiece of his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, as I have previously discussed. Proust in particular concerns himself with what he called involuntary memories, which are those memories spontaneously evoked by experiences and come to us quite unaware, as it were.
Marcel Proust: novelist of involuntary memory.
It would be plainly wrong to say that Proust was a deconstructionist, or that he was attempting a deconstruction of experience. On the contrary, Proust was attempting a novel synthesis of experience. Yet there is something deconstructionist in the character in Proust’s method. The deconstructionist seizes upon the apparently innocuous detail, the casual aside, or the exception noted, and from this modest beginning unravels the whole, like pulling on a loose thread and having it unravel a garment entire. Proust too employs the minor detail and the casual aside, but rather than using it to deconstruct, he uses it to construct a subtle and comprehensive synthesis of memory. Thus Proustian method constitutes a cultivation of memory.
The cultivation of memory can be a constructive exercise, as in Proust, but it can also be fragmented by what we may call unintended memories or unexpected memories, which are related to involuntary memories, but which are not exactly the same thing. (Involuntary memories may also be unintended memories and vice versa, but not necessarily so in either case.) An intended memory is that memory we intend to bequeath to ourselves in consciously seeking a certain experience that will generate the memory. An unintended memory is a memory generated without conscious intent, epiphenomenal to the planned event and its expected result.
There is nothing surprising or novel in observing that life is full of unintended memories. What is interesting is when an unintended memory partly or even wholly supplants an intended memory. Perhaps, for example, one visits the Eiffel Tower and rather than remembering the views of Paris from the top, one only remembers watching an attractive Parisienne rollerblading while one waited for the elevator that would take one up the tower. One returns from one’s trip to Paris not with fond memories of Paris but with memories of a Parisienne. In this way, unintentional memory can utterly overturn intended memory and what Proust called intellectual memory, which is an exercise of will. In this sense, unintended memory is revolutionary (in a purely personal sense), and by the experience of unintended memory one’s life can be transformed in unintended and unexpected ways.
Travel is a sequence of unintended and unexpected events that overlap and intersect with planned and intended events; the intended and the unintended interpenetrate organically, and can cannot be separated without a conceptual act of violence. In other words, if we so separate intended memories from unintended memories, they become abstract. An intended memory in isolation from the unintended memories that constitute its context is incoherent and strictly incomprehensible. One goes to Norway with the intention of seeing the Viking ships in the museum, taking pictures of what one has seen, and reflecting upon what one has seen, but one does not go with the intention of seeing a butterfly perfectly superimposed upon a flower, remaining in stillness until its portrait can be captured with a camera.
This is only a problem if one has a grand, schematic plan for life in which experiences and their memories will fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, with a place for everything and everything in its place. If this is the perfection of life, I want no part of it. The Hellenic ideal of order, harmony, and proportion is more likely to yield ennui than satisfaction.
The proper attitude, as I see it, is to plunge oneself head-first into unintended and unexpected experiences, to embrace them, to cultivate the unexpected memories generated by unexpected experiences, rather than the planned and the contrived, which verges on artificiality. One cannot plan the unintended or the unexpected, but if one can recognize it for what it is when it comes, then one can appreciate it on its own terms as an instance of serendipity or, if you like, a moment of grace.
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