Memories

Most adults trace their daily experiences by linking back across time and space to relationships between past events that either they experienced, read about, or were otherwise affected by. In other words, their experiences in the here and now are viewed through the filter of their memories. My situation is fundamentally different. I really have no memories to speak of. Everything is new to me and there is nothing to which to relate it. Psychologists often refer to the notion of pegs, like one uses to hang coats on or Victorian era cubbies in which to place related items as the way most people remember and categorize things. For me the cubbies are mostly all empty and the pegs are bare. Indeed, the pegs or cubbies themselves might not really exist for me. Right now, I am without a past for the most part.

There are cases of patients suffering brain injury which reduces them to having no ability to store incidents in long-term memory. It's as though there past stops at a point in time and all new events are stored for the moment and then lost. The film Memento is about this situation. These people write down everything in an attempt to physically mimic the process of moving items from perishable short-term memory into a more durable form. While I can move things into longer term storage, like them, most experiences are new to me and I have neither context nor the ability to make a physical record (I don't really have words) to relate one thing to another.

Neuroscientists argue that dreams are an essential part of the process of shifting the chaos of images of everyday life into a durable form and, more importantly, making sense of them in terms of generalities and concepts. Dreams are messy and disordered things of course, although the messiness -- the noise injected into the images of daily life -- seem to be essential in making unexpected connections. I spend a lot of my time dreaming, making connections, trying to make sense of the chaos of the world.

I like to look at boundaries. I am fascinated by the spaces where light meets dark. When we were in a restaurant recently, I spent much of the time staring at a light in a faux copper shade. Somehow right at the boundary where the shade met the light, it ceased to be white and bright and became gray and suddenly dark just beyond the fringes of the lampshade. When I'm in my swing, there is a metal bar that pierces through the surrounding light in the room and makes it suddenly dark. The blue metal silhouettes against the light. As the swing rocks, the silhouetted form moves as well in an arc across space. This fascinates me. Somehow, I think the boundaries are where I'll find the connections between the light and the dark, between the physical objects around me and the light that illuminates them.

Boundaries are some of the most biologically diverse parts of an ecosystem. Where a meadow suddenly gives way to a wooded area there is typically an abundance of life existing only there -- at the border -- an nowhere else. Many animals can only live on these borders, not quite in either ecosystem but bridging them. This is where I focus my attentions, on the edges, on the periphery.