Memory is a strange thing, especially where it is mitigated by MS. It is difficult, sometimes, to decide what has been forgotten in the normal way and what has been erased by MS.
Recently, I was telling my ex-wife about my visit to the American consulate here in Denpasar, describing how surprised I was by the high security measures and so on.
"Well, you've been there before," she said.
"No, I haven't!"
"Yes, you went with me and Sasha a couple years ago when we had to renew Sasha's American passport. Don't you remember?"
Well … no. Not at all. I was quite certain that I had never been there before. If I had, why would I have needed to use my phone navigator to find the place? Why would the place itself have seemed as new as a different planet? And yet, her narrative made sense. The facts were on her side. The details that she recalled were perfectly convincing and likely.
I had been to the consulate before. The experience had merely been erased. And it was not something that could be revived by pertinent information, as is often the case with something that one has forgotten in the natural way. There was no, "Oh yeah, that's right, now I remember." It was simply gone, as if it had never happened.
Entire swathes of my life are simply gone in this manner. I can remember but small bits and pieces of this or that decade. At the same time, I will remember events from childhood--even common sorts of events--as if they had happened yesterday. For instance, I was watching an old Abbot and Costello movie last night (it had popped up in my suggested viewing from YouTube, which seems to calculate my interests better than my own brain does). The movie was Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The curious thing is that I remembered this movie frame by frame, knew what was going to happen before it happened. Moreover, I remembered sitting on the floor by my brother, remembered the room we were in, remembered that we were eating popcorn, remembered the things in the movie that we laughed at and the things we talked about. This must have been nearly 60 years ago. On the other hand, I can watch a movie now and remember so little of it that watching it again is like watching it for the first time.
Yesterday when I went to the Seminyak Starbucks, multiple people greeted me as I did my slow tour of the place. "Hi, Pak Will! How are you?" I did not know these people, I did not recognize their faces. I merely pretended to know them. Oh, hi, good to see you again … whoever you are. Again, on the other hand, I had arranged, a few years ago back in Portland, to meet my old childhood friend, Marc. We had not seen each other in perhaps 40 years--had had no contact whatsoever during that period of time. And yet, I picked him out of a crowd at our agreed upon meeting place instantly.
How can it be?
Perhaps a good measure for determining MS erasure as opposed to a natural fading of sharp recollection is in the ability of the normal mental processes to search and locate. The memory, in the normal scenario, is there--it just needs some dusting off, some brushing away of cobwebs, while in the case of something that has been completely smudged out by MS, there is no revival, no retrieval, for the thing has simply been burned away in a flash of erroneous neurologic process and gone up in smoke. It no longer exists except in the testimony of others.
What remains however (I believe) is an emotional, spiritual sort of comprehension, a deeply embedded assimilation of experience that tends toward wisdom. Somewhere, deep in the soil of experience, the thing has been implanted, and though you can no longer see it or name it, it takes root nonetheless and flourishes beneath the surface.
I hope so, anyway.
Recently, I was telling my ex-wife about my visit to the American consulate here in Denpasar, describing how surprised I was by the high security measures and so on.
"Well, you've been there before," she said.
"No, I haven't!"
"Yes, you went with me and Sasha a couple years ago when we had to renew Sasha's American passport. Don't you remember?"
Well … no. Not at all. I was quite certain that I had never been there before. If I had, why would I have needed to use my phone navigator to find the place? Why would the place itself have seemed as new as a different planet? And yet, her narrative made sense. The facts were on her side. The details that she recalled were perfectly convincing and likely.
I had been to the consulate before. The experience had merely been erased. And it was not something that could be revived by pertinent information, as is often the case with something that one has forgotten in the natural way. There was no, "Oh yeah, that's right, now I remember." It was simply gone, as if it had never happened.
Entire swathes of my life are simply gone in this manner. I can remember but small bits and pieces of this or that decade. At the same time, I will remember events from childhood--even common sorts of events--as if they had happened yesterday. For instance, I was watching an old Abbot and Costello movie last night (it had popped up in my suggested viewing from YouTube, which seems to calculate my interests better than my own brain does). The movie was Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The curious thing is that I remembered this movie frame by frame, knew what was going to happen before it happened. Moreover, I remembered sitting on the floor by my brother, remembered the room we were in, remembered that we were eating popcorn, remembered the things in the movie that we laughed at and the things we talked about. This must have been nearly 60 years ago. On the other hand, I can watch a movie now and remember so little of it that watching it again is like watching it for the first time.
Yesterday when I went to the Seminyak Starbucks, multiple people greeted me as I did my slow tour of the place. "Hi, Pak Will! How are you?" I did not know these people, I did not recognize their faces. I merely pretended to know them. Oh, hi, good to see you again … whoever you are. Again, on the other hand, I had arranged, a few years ago back in Portland, to meet my old childhood friend, Marc. We had not seen each other in perhaps 40 years--had had no contact whatsoever during that period of time. And yet, I picked him out of a crowd at our agreed upon meeting place instantly.
How can it be?
Perhaps a good measure for determining MS erasure as opposed to a natural fading of sharp recollection is in the ability of the normal mental processes to search and locate. The memory, in the normal scenario, is there--it just needs some dusting off, some brushing away of cobwebs, while in the case of something that has been completely smudged out by MS, there is no revival, no retrieval, for the thing has simply been burned away in a flash of erroneous neurologic process and gone up in smoke. It no longer exists except in the testimony of others.
What remains however (I believe) is an emotional, spiritual sort of comprehension, a deeply embedded assimilation of experience that tends toward wisdom. Somewhere, deep in the soil of experience, the thing has been implanted, and though you can no longer see it or name it, it takes root nonetheless and flourishes beneath the surface.
I hope so, anyway.
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