Human memory is the vital element that makes us individuals. Many people may experience the same incident, perhaps a goal being scored, and yet they will all remember the incident slightly differently. Within those differences sits a person’s soul.
I asked Co – Pilot for a 250 word precis of how human memory works. It identified three stages: Sensory, Short Term and then finally the infinitely capacious Long Term. Smell is the most potent sense when forming memories. Perhaps this is because compared to sight it is a much more rarefied presence. Certain smells linger. Death, in whatever form you may have experienced it, has an odour all of its own. These tend to provide a vivid cadence to the long term memories.
Long Term has a weight we all carry. The more we build up the heavier the weight becomes. This weight is not evenly distributed. Some memories are as light as a feather. Others come with a great burden that no confessor can help us with. This could be described as the Tempus memoria and it increases ever so slightly each time we reoccupy such memories.
Of course time not only relieves us of many memories but also subtly rewrites their reply when accessed. The older you get the more this appears to occur until the whole thing is forgotten or so garbled that if you are honest with yourself you cannot be sure anymore whether it is valid or a distortion of what you experienced. Tempus Memoria.
Then there are long forgotten memories that suddenly, reappear after what seems like forever. They appear to be fully formed as though what they recall something that happened only a few days ago.
This happened to me yesterday as I was walking around a small village in west Leicestershire. I have known the settlement all my life and yet I became very aware that the last time I had walked the streets of this, now very gentrified, village was over 50 years ago. This was then Instantaneously by another, much more will o’ the wisp, memory. No more than a suggestion that I had been there much later, perhaps only 20 to 30 years ago. I am sure the 50 year old memory was accurate. The later less so.
Perhaps neither is as accurate as I would like or recall. Perhaps my person memory lane is congealed than I would like to believe. It has slowly filling with the sludge of decay that robs us of certainty.
Perhaps I am not now possessed of a memory I can rely on. I do find myself writing down many more things that once would happily spring back to my mind in an instance.
I also try to continually to exercise my mind and memory in the vain hope that this will remove or at least lessen the sludge. I suspect this is the forlorn hope. Just like our bodies our minds become flabby and no amount of heavy lifting will be able to restore them to how they were before our lives intervened.
Tempus Memoria.
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