Memories are deteriorating in my head...

[thymamai]

and it is not Alzheimer's. There is entropy going on in my brain, the past slips further away and less is recalled by the day unless I start padding it up with imagination and hopeful make-believe or martyrdom, and that I won't do. How much of our minds is more distorted than it would have to be, how often we paint it a little brighter or bleaker to suite our current view of life? Very often I bet, and make it seem fatter and stuffier than it in reality would be, fake memories masking the real ones, making it all a mesh that is impossible to disentangle. In someways it would be easier like that, not really caring if the past is accurate, the present delusions making it appropriate enough. I have no problem with seeing how things are, as far as I am able, but it brings another problem closer. I feel the void in my brain eating and hiding memories, almost like an actual entity -- almost.

I think to realize this requires a perspective only one's own life can offer, seeing the contrast, and I have been peripherally aware of this for a long long time, the past slipping, the current moment never peaking high enough to be fully preserved. I have a fairly good memory in some respects, and I can write loads of stuff what happened recently, achieving considerable detail sometimes, but then a week goes by, common memories all but gone, the special moments reduced somewhat; a month goes by, the ordinary completely swallowed, the meaningful barely remembered, a word, a sentence written down if I try; a year passes, it is all hazy, single solitary memories remain, and a handful of important new ideas and events remain to be locked for the decades to come, and mostly all that was new is seen through the eyes of the past, through my quirks, through my perspective and values that are mine alone. These are genuine memories, the emotional connections. The data, names, details, locations on their own are not, they are small emotionless details, like grains of sand, one by one picked from the sandcastle, from the form and meaning, and these grains just lie there near or far, separate entities, meaningless breakaways, zero emotional connection to them, like remembering a phone number.

But even that isn't worrisome, what is is that the memories that are locked away and preserved as well as my mind is able, are suffering from the same illness, tiny pieces falling off, and eventually they too are reduced to details with no meaning to me. I would describe these final remnants as paragraph length memories, for that is as much as I can recall of them while having a direct emotional response, like living a moment again, feeling the gravity of them. And there is absolutely nothing I can do to save them, to preserve them. Every time I visit a memory, any memory, it is simplified, an ancient or more recent pathway burns through my brain and scorches all that gets too close to it, linked memories turn into inaccessible islands or are destroyed completely, one never knows. And soon, these hubs are reduced to unemotional, shrinking and ruined cities, sand coated... I wonder how many of these dead cities are in my head, constantly being levelled by time and the incapability of my human brain to keep it connected. And once in a while I find a single piece of them but cannot connect it to anything else, I could create new surroundings by lies and pretension, but wouldn't help a thing, the emotional links have been lost forever, the past escaped me, for soon enough it doesn't mean anything to me any more. And even the old data is lost eventually.

Simple ageless data that can be reacquired again, data and locations, might as well be brand new, but what about the life lived? Who will remember it? The past dies, slips through our fingers. We cannot even remember how our mind died, what made us -- us. I wonder how much I died today, what roads were forever separated, what dreamlike memories only chance might lead me to meet again, a satisfyingly precious and rare nugget telling me that the past is still there for a moment longer... it is life, isn't it, to have it a moment longer, the small dying memories that are so very important.

 

[DiMoiTou]

I feel you. My theory on that is that I've been too hungry, I've filled my head to the top and now my brain is rewriting random bits. That or too much weed. :roll:
I must say, it's helpful to have an external hard drive, a lover for instance
If one digs a little, one realizes everyone suffers from this ailment, some more than others.
But I try not to worry about that and enjoy the now, and I advise to do the same.

 

[Koornut]

And once in a while I find a single piece of them but cannot connect it to anything else, I could create new surroundings by lies and pretension, but wouldn't help a thing, the emotional links have been lost forever, the past escaped me, for soon enough it doesn't mean anything to me any more. And even the old data is lost eventually.

"A story told well transcends the truth or lie of the originators experience."

The emotional links are not lost, they exist in the heart of another. And you can experience them again, when you tell the story and see the spark of connection light up the eyes and mind of that other.

 

[RAM]

I am sorry if this is causing you distress. But the more you focus on the past slipping away, the more it will. Studies supposedly show that many of our memories are constructed in our heads using what we know now, our current emotional state, and how we want to remember the past. Also when remembering a past event you are likely not remembering the event itself, but rather you are remembering the memory of the last time you thought about this event.

Try focusing on improving the now. Don't think so much. I have recently been struggling by asking myself, "What is everything I know about (some topic)?" This drives me crazy as I am never able to list out all of my knowledge, and this makes me feel like I don't know and can't remember anything. But the truth is that we are not computer file systems. We cannot store everything in perfect little folders, waiting to be opened and read whenever the power is on.

Our minds are more akin to puzzle treasure boxes, with the key being context and conversation. Maybe you can't access whatever lesson you learned last week while sitting here trying to do so. But when faced with a certain situation, whatever you learned will come right to you.

If you keep feeling anguish over your loss of memories, start keeping a diary of some sort. If this proves to be too much, just write down or type one significant moment or lesson every day. When you start to feel like you can't remember your life, go over these moments and lessons. Hopefully they will remind you of the great substance of your life, or maybe they'll encourage you to go out and experience even more beauty in the world.

You claim also that there is nothing you can do to preserve certain memories. If this is the truth, then why feel bad about it? Be careful with trying to contain your past, as this may be your ego trying to maintain control. Simply let go and flow within the present moment! I also recommend reading Ram Dass' Be Here Now, either for the first time or again, to remind you of what can be gained from truly living in the moment.

 

[thymamai]

Yes. Why let it hurt me, why let it hurt you?

Because that is what you call love.

To see a light with pure meaning and think it infallible then to forget all about it even refute it with the next breath.
What merit, what value can there be in such a thing if it cannot, even refuses to stand the test of time at all?

It means nothing, says nothing, proves nothing. And yet you attribute so much to the word and call it yours, your love, your life, your doing

 

[Just.Ask.The.Axis]

I love what is still to come, but know that the past brought me here today. The past is dark because the future is where to look. Pull the curtain on the past.

 

[thymamai]

Apparently I am much more akin / like-minded / like-afflicted to the author of 'memories are deteriorating' than I first thought, or others would find the sentiment as comprehensible and relatable as I did.

I admit I am somewhat baffled.. don't suppose some day I will have to follow up on the subject, try and elucidate it's core components, distinguish tropes from causes and conditions.

 

[Pandora]

The loss of past memories is bitter/sweet. There is some stuff I couldn't forget fast enough - actually worked to try to destroy. There's other stuff I'd like to hang onto until my dying moment.

For me, the main factor in keeping memories fresh and accurate within the context of consensual reality is to review them, not only with people who were there, but to actually re-visit locations, etc.,

For me, the main factor in loosing memories appears to be time - the 35 to 40+ year ones are decayed and lack details.

The whole thing instills me with tremendous ambivalence. Sure the only permanence is impermanence but I am as human and empathic as the next person and it is painful to loose memories of dead loved ones.

 

[thymamai]

Pandora, you draw a good, legitimate point - from consensual reality via mortality to the death of a loved one which is a perfect illustration of the immutable casualties we suffer both in life and in memory. It helps somewhat to clarify what I meant by love. Connections, whether personal or those more vague and mysterious vectors drawn from synapse to synapse, which we suppose or rather to which is super-imposed ineradicability.
It is only human to forget, but more human still to strive not to - an ideal quality but one that precarizes history -- for the past is precluded by memory in the way that thought is but a skeletal meandering of past sensations.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
― Chris Marker

The blueprints of images of pure experience fade with the succession of new ones and our focus, scrambling simultaneously to reconstruct them as they vanish under it's own scouring vortices, inadvertently rekindling old flames with new words, repurposing old sentiments with scraps of otherwise foreign material.. (often, attaching as anecdotes the sentimental words of others shared, harmless, but coloring over slightly our own in unpredictable ways.. to carry that back to 'consensual reality')

As a person with memory problems as well as difficulties with empathy, I am less inclined to do that with people, at least to share memories as I can taste them feel them know them verbatim. For they tend for me to be lessened in doing so, and are not brightened or fortified. Though I seem to have forgotten sharing a little of a certain loved one's death in my own life here in this forum at some point, and appreciate that you seem to have, apparently, connected that or.. or, at the very least would otherwise be able to relate, as I can relate to what you wrote here.

"To live is to lose time; we can recover or keep nothing except under the form of eternity" -- George Santayana.

The archetypes, eternity --these two words -- hold out the promise of more solid possessions. For it is true that succession is an intolerable misery, and magnanimous appetites are greedy for all the minutes of time and all the variety of space.

Personal identity is known to reside in memory, and the annulment of that faculty is known to result in idiocy. It is possible to think the same thing of the universe. Without an eternity, without a sensitive, secret mirror of what passes through every soul, universal history is lost time, and along with it our personal history -- which rather uncomfortably makes ghosts of us. The Berliner Company's gramophone records or the transparent cinema are insufficient, mere images of images, idols of other idols. Eternity is a more copious invention. True, it is inconceivable, but then so is humble successive time. To deny eternity, to suppose the vast annihilation of the years freighted with cities, rivers, and jubilations, is no less incredible that to imagine their total salvation.

How did eternity come into being? St. Augustine ignores the problem, but notes something that seems to allow for a solution: the elements of past and future that exist in every present. He cites a specific case: the recitation of a poem.

'Before beginning, the poem exists in my expectation; when I have just finished, in my memory; but as I am reciting it, it is extended in my memory, on account of what I have already said; and in my expectation, on account of what I have yet to say. What takes place with the entirety of the poem takes place also in each verse and each syllable. This also holds true of the larger action of which the poem is part, and of the individual destiny of a man, which is composed of a series of actions and of humanity, which is a series of individual destinies.'

Nevertheless, this verification of the intimate intertwining of the diverse tenses of time still includes succession, which is not commensurate with a model of unanimous eternity.
I believe nostalgia was that model. The exile who with melting heart remembers his expectations of happiness sees them sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), completely forgetting that the achievement of one of them would exclude or postpone all the others. In passion, memory inclines towards the intemporal. We gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image; the diversely red sunsets I watch every evening will in memory be a single sunset. The same is true of foresight: nothing prevents the most incompatible hopes from peacefully coexisting.

To put it differently: eternity is the style of desire. (The particular enjoyment that enumeration yields may plausibly reside in its insinuation of the eternal).

 

[thymamai]

Also, this short by Jorge Borges entitled "Feeling in Death" I feel extremely pertinent. It echoes my feelings here perfectly.

I wish to record an experience I had a few nights ago: a triviality too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental for thought. It was a scene and its word: a word I had spoken but had not fully lived with all my being until then. I will recount its history and the accidents of time and place that revealed it to me.

I remember it thus: On the afternoon before that night, I was in Barracas, an area I do not customarily visit, and whose distance from the places I later passed through had already given the day a strange savor. The night had no objective whatsoever; the weather was clear, and so, after dinner, I went out to walk and remember. I did not want to establish any particular direction for my stroll: I strove for a maximum latitude of possibility so as not to fatigue my expectant mind with the obligatory foresight of a particular path. I accomplished, to the unsatisfactory degree to which it is possible, what is called strolling at random, without other conscious resolve than to pass up the avenues and broad streets in favor of chance's more obscure invitations. Yet a kind of familiar gravitation pushed me toward neighborhoods whose name I wish always to remember, places that fill my heart with reverence. I am not alluding to my own neighborhood, the precise circumfererence of my childhood, but to its still mysterious outskirts; a frontier region I have possessed fully in words and very little in reality, at once adjacent and mythical. These penultimate streets are, for me, the opposite of what is familiar, its other face, almost as unknown as the buried foundations of our house or our own invisible skeleton. The walk left me at a street corner. I took in the night, in perfect, serene respite from thought. The vision before me, not at all complex to begin with, seemed further simplified by my fatigue. Its very ordinariness made it unreal. It was a street of one-story houses, and through its first meaning was poverty, its second was certainly bliss. It was the poorest and most beautiful thing. The houses faced away from the street; a fig tree merged into shadow over the blunted streetcorner, and the narrow portals--higher than the extending lines of the walls--seemed wrought of the same infinite substance as the night. The sidewalk was embanked above a street of elemental dirt, the dirt of a still unconquered America. In the distance, the road, by then a country lane, crumbled into the Maldonado River. Against the muddy, chaotic earth, a low, rose-colored wall seemed not to harbor the moonlight but to shimmer with a gleam all its own. Tenderness could have no better name than that rose color.

I stood there looking at this simplicity. I thought, undoubtedly aloud: "This is the same as it was thirty years ago." I imagined that date: recent enough in other countries, but already remote on this ever-changing side of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, bird-sized fondness; but there was probably no other sound in the dizzying silence except for the equally timeless noise of crickets. The glib thought I am in the year eighteen hundred and something ceased to be a few approximate words and deepened into reality. I felt as the dead feel, I felt myself to be an abstract observer of the world: an indefinite fear imbued with knowledge that is the greatest clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had made my way upstream on the presumptive waters of Time. Rather, I suspected myself to be in possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this figment of my imagination.

I write it out now: This pure representation of homogenous facts--the serenity of the night, the translucent little wall, the small-town scent of honeysuckle, the fundamental dirt--is not merely identical to what existed on that corner many years ago; it is, without superficial resemblances or repetitions, the same. When we can feel this oneness, time is a delusion wich the difference and inseparability of a moment from its apparent yesterday and from its apparent today suffice to disintegrate.

The number of such human moments is clearly not infinite. The elemental experiences--physical suffering and physical pleasure, falling asleep, listening to a piece of music, feeling great intensity or great apathy--are even more impersonal. I derive, in advance, this conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be immortal. But we lack even the certainty of our own poverty, given that time, which is easily refutable by the senses, is not so easily refuted by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession appears inseparable. Let there remain, then, the glimpse of an idea in an emotional anecdote, and, in the acknowledged irresolution of this page, the true moment of ecstasy and the possible intimation of eternity which that night did not hoard from me.

 

[hixidom]

I've found that, in my mind, the past and future are very similar: Both become more fuzzy further from the present. Somehow, remembering something in the past is equivalent to predicting something in the future. I like to think that we are "remembering" both the past and future.