On Memory

Marianne Janack

“Why is it that I can remember crap like what you said about the glass cookware, but not other things?” John, my husband, asked the other day.  He had just been talking about our glass baking dishes which, he said, I’d been right about.  I’d said, once upon a time—30 years ago or so-- that food wouldn’t stick to them, and, he said, I was right.

I didn’t remember saying that. I didn’t care that much about whether I’d said that or not. But, of course, this is how memories between people, especially couples perhaps, can go: one person remembers something that the other doesn’t, and there’s no one else around to serve as an arbitrator. 

 As we sat at the kitchen island last night—the pendant lights hanging down from the ceiling shining on the blackish-green granite, the fireplace in the kitchen burning, the snow falling and the wind howling—John asked me if I remembered the show “Hawaii Five-O”.

 “Yes,” I said.  “My family and I used to watch that.”

 “What was that show based in San Francisco?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling.

 “The Streets of San Francisco?” I asked.

 “Yes!  That’s the one!  And did you watch that show with Andy Griffith and Don Rickles?”

 “The Andy Griffith Show” I said.  “Yes, we watched that.”

 “With that kid who went on to be a director—what was his name…?”

 “Ron Howard”

 “And there was the Dick Van Dyke show—did you watch that?”

 “Yes, we did.”

 “He played an ad executive.  Who was his boss?  Not Mel Brooks, but Mel Brooks’s friend….”

 “Carl Reiner.”

 “Yes, that’s right!” he said, as if he’d just discovered something.

John went on to list a number of other shows he liked to watch—Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, F Troop, Gomer Pyle—as he walked around the kitchen absentmindedly.  Was he seeing those shows as he asked about them?  Or just showing that he could remember them? Maybe revisiting his childhood? 

Remembering and Forgetting: Metaphors of Carl Ebbinghaus developed what is called “the forgetting curve,” which shows how memories decay over time.  But subsequent theories of remembering and forgetting were based not on how discrete facts get stored and forgotten, but how particular items become meaningful, and how remembering some things makes us forget others—the currency exchange of what our remembering selves value the most. 

Thomas de Quincey called the mind a palimpsest: parchment that is written on, and then written over.  Sometimes we glimpse words or images that were earlier written down through those that are on the surface.  But what those will be, we have no idea—and we cannot control that.

The narrator of Borges’ story “Shakespeare’s Memory” says that St. Augustine talked about memory as both a palace and a cavern; the curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles tells a writer that Plato compared memory to a tower around which birds fly—but one might try to catch one bird and come up with a different one. 

I could not find anything to confirm these claims.  The closest reference might be in the Theaetetus, wherein Socrates compares the human soul to an aviary holding a variety of birds, each representing different types of knowledge that humans attempt to “catch” in order to form judgments.

Plato does compare the human memory to a wax tablet in the Timaeus; in the Meno, a slave’s ability to figure out geometrical truths is explained by memory, which Socrates suggests is a form of recollection; a speaker in Plato’s Phaedrus suggests that writing will make people forgetful, since they will not need to remember things that they can write down. 

And Augustine does, in fact, compare the memory to a palace. Frances Yates begins her book The Art of Memory with a discussion of how the metaphor of memory as a palace was used to help people improve their memories.  Putting images in places––connecting them to rooms––and then moving in one’s mind through the rooms was a classic memory technique.  Yates begins her book with a story of a man who remembers all the guests at a dinner by where they were seated. 

But I couldn’t find where Augustine compared memory to a cavern: a dark and mysterious place hidden away, like the basement of a house.  Yet, it’s not hard to see the aptness of this metaphor—sometimes we remember things that we’d rather not, or drag things up that we weren’t looking for, like the names of shows we watched as children or (in my case) the phone number of a friend from high school whom I haven’t seen since 1982.

Maybe, as I suspect Borges’s story is suggesting, the truth of memory is beside the point.  Did Plato compare remembering to trying to catch a bird?  Did Augustine compare memory to a cavern and a palace?  If they didn’t, they should have—these metaphors suggest not just how we remember, but how we misremember, or try to forget.  And these metaphors might help us understand the ways that memory can be unruly, how it can give us the trivial and the important, the poetic and the banal. 

The Memory Palace

 From The New Yorker (Dec. 29 and Jan. 5, 2025 issue);

Every memory palace should have a damp basement
with frozen pipes and mouse bones,
shreds of pink insulation, you dare not enter.
Every memory palace should have
my childhood basement, at the dead end of Elm St.,
with its soft beams and dirt floor
where we stored a mannequin named Greta
who scared us to death every time we went to reset the hot- water tank.
Greta, purchased from the Lazarus department store
closing sale, 1996. The same store where my feet
were measured by those amazing people
who used to kneel in front of you
to press a big toe against the leather and tell you to
walk around a little, see how it feels.
Everything khaki and ketchup red; frosted glass, pastel floral.
Santa Claus lived there, at the top of the staircase,
and I sat on him, suddenly aware of how grubby
my winter coat was, and my fingernails; how crooked
my gaze. Greta watched—flawless, in her prime
in the newest sweater and pantyhose and pencil skirt,
not knowing she would be purchased by us
for $40. Not knowing she would end up
in the muddy basement of a farmhouse,
naked, dismembered, her breasts bared for no one
but the spiders, the red efts, the plumbers,
her arm lying beside her, her hand
with three missing fingers that were
kicking around somewhere upstairs—

I have no memory palace.
I have tomato-paste cans bloated
on a sagging plywood shelf.
Memory: the botulism exhibit. Lockjaw.
A declawed cat. Come, and you’ll trip over a cement statue
of a cement bag that got wet before it was even opened,
all its creases preserved perfectly—

 (from Bianca Stone’s poem “The Memory Palace” to be published in The Near and Distant World, Tin House Books)