Memories

by John Nelson

_

Let’s think about our brains – our memory in particular – and envision them as though they were actually those tall, metal filing cabinets with the label slots in the drawers that nobody ever actually labels so that when you are looking for a certain file, you end up having to pull all three drawers all the way out and thumb through each tabbed divider and usually the file you need is at the very back. These are the same file drawers with that little knob attached to the long spoke that runs the length of the drawer, just beneath where the file folders hang [what is that spoke even for?].

Even though our memory is not actually a filing cabinet, I’d like to make the argument that it functions like one.

It seems as though we have a process of purging our memories that functions a lot like the Recycle Bin on a computer desktop. When we delete something to make room for more files, it is not ever completely erased. Even when you empty the Recycle Bin, it’s still there on the hard drive and, if you wanted it badly enough, able to be retrieved.

So we might forget about something only until we hear or see a trigger. This might be a person’s name [Karla, a former coworker, will always remind me of Megan, one of the ones that got away and did so quite literally by moving to New York], a photograph of a place [pictures of Palm Springs always make me think of a Bret Easton Ellis novel because of Clay’s italicized flashbacks], that song that was on when you lost your virginity [I lost mine at five in the morning so I was not afforded the luxury of music], or the first time you saw a film starring Harrison Ford [mine was Temple of Doom and I was so very afraid of the “Kali Ma” guy]. Suddenly, there’s the memory you hadn’t recalled in months, years, maybe an entire decade, and you cannot believe you’d let that one go. At the time you deleted it, it made sense, because you needed room for new and therefore more important memories. But now you wish it had been with you all along and you vow never again to let go of it. If somebody is around who was there when the memory was originally created, you might mention it to them: I can’t believe I forgot about this. Do you remember Betty? I can’t believe I was ever attracted to someone who didn’t think Uncle Buck was funny.

We can imagine then that there are two file cabinets. One is material: you can see it and touch it, open its drawers and access all of its files. But it is finite. This is our short-term memory cabinet, and there are only so many files that it will hold. You could cram more in there, but then they would bunch up and overflow and nobody wants that sort of mess in their brain. Beside this first file cabinet, there is a second, which is immaterial. You cannot see it but it’s not as though it were simply invisible; you forget it is there. This long-term, suppressed file cabinet has unlimited space. In fact, a person might fit a whole lifetime of files there. Its drawers – and the spokes that line them – could span for miles, depending on how exciting and noteworthy your life ends up being. It is when one of these triggers is pulled that it becomes visible, but because it exists in the subconscious mind, it doesn’t look like the one that is always present, the cabinet you’ve become familiar with. It’s like seeing God: you are not able to look straight at it or you’ll go blind, in the metaphysical sense. A blindness of the soul, rather than one of the eyes.

The other stipulation is that when the long-term cabinet comes into view, one may not peruse at will. No, the trigger allows only for access to that specific memory that resurfaced as a reaction to it. So while this cabinet is accessible, you may remove the file for that memory and once you have, the cabinet becomes nonexistent once more.

The file you pull, depending on how much nostalgic value it is endowed with, may be one that you decide to keep in the short-term cabinet for a while. Or until you wear it out again or need room for still another memory. One can never say.

This leads to memory by association. Some files are more thoroughly detailed than others and within that individual file, you might have tabbed references to other related files, or placed post-it notes suggesting you see another file for relevant information. This is one distinct exception to the rule about having access to only one file at a time from the mystical cabinet: what happens is that a specific long-term memory might, itself, be a trigger for still another or possibly a handful of long-term, deleted memories. If this is the case, all files involved with the chain of memory are placed in your arms in one stack, causing you to appear like an intern at an office job, or the autobiographical narrator of Amelie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling.

This takes us to the idea that started me thinking about all of this: If a particular file has already been placed at the front of your queue, no matter its size, we can assume it is the easiest one to access, or at least easier than it had previously been – which is worth taking note of, because it does not take long for files to begin moving, once more, further back in line as new memories are created moment by moment. In either case, if a file is made more accessible based on its relative location, we are more likely to reference files that correspond to it, within a given time frame. As an example to illustrate this point: my fiancée and I were discussing a friend of hers named Susan. On one occasion, we attended a screening of an eighties kids’ movie from Canada, The Peanut Butter Solution, with Susan and her boyfriend. This movie was so bizarre and like nothing else I have ever seen, that I don’t believe I can do it justice. To make it brief: a young boy sneaks into a haunted house and the ghosts there give him such a scare that all of his hair falls out, which leads to teasing from the kids at school and an inexplicable scene of the bald boy angrily banging on a drum-set. Later, the ghosts feel bad about what they have done and show up in the middle of the night to make a hair-growing solution from peanut butter and other things. The boy puts it on his head and in the morning his hair has grown several inches. By the end of the day it is growing over his face and past his feet. When the creepy art teacher [a caricature of Salvador Dali if he showered a lot less often] from the boy’s school notices this, he kidnaps the boy and uses his hair to make paintbrushes. Actually, he kidnaps several children from the town and has this sweatshop kind of thing going where the kids make paintbrushes out of the boy’s hair. I think at this point there’s still another half hour left in the movie. You really need to see it to believe it.

So my fiancée and I were at our apartment, talking about Susan, and The Peanut Butter Solution was not mentioned because it did not hold relevance in the conversation. Later that evening, my fiancée made a joke about something I said, and used the title of the film in jest. Nowhere in this second conversation was Susan brought up or alluded to. My belief is that the file for The Peanut Butter Solution was attached to the file for Susan, so that when we had both earlier accessed our Susan file, The Peanut Butter Solution was also brought to the front of our memory cabinet. Had the second of our two conversations occurred in exactly the same way, but a few nights later instead of the same night as the first, my fiancée would have been less likely to mention The Peanut Butter Solution, because both the file about Susan and, consequently, the file about the film, would have already slipped that much further back.

If you pay attention to this in your everyday life, you’ll notice it happening even more than you’d suspect. That some memories are hidden and not retrievable at will, but occur instead by chance, makes life and conversations both that much more interesting. And perhaps if we were able to control it, we would overuse nostalgia and it would be less of a pleasurable experience.

My Cup of Tea

by Claire Hellar

_

The summer before freshman year of college, my mother told me, with concerned certainty, “You’re not going to read in college. You’re going to be busy.”

“Mom,” I responded with the lofty surety of youth, “Reading is a part of my life. I’m not going to stop just because I go to college.”

Three years later, I wonder which of us was right. The number of books I read per year has steadily decreased with each year I spend in college. As a kid, growing up in a remote village in Papua New Guinea, I used to read four books every Saturday, and at least the same number during the week. Classic literature, adventure stories, fantasy, and westerns – nothing escaped the scope of my radar. Isolated from civilization, I would willingly choose the world of fiction over the world of reality, and move seamlessly from the valiant mouse-heroics of Brian Jacques’ *Redwall* series to the embattled journeys of Alistair MacLean’s Bond-esque heroes to the romance and tragedy of Louisa May Alcott’s *Little Women*. Books were my freedom, my magic carpet ride to other lands.

Six years later, I am experiencing not just the double loss of my childhood and the country I grew up in, as my home, halfway across the world, fades into memory and I move on to adult life here in the U.S, but also the world which I spent most of my early years living in – that of books. Now a third-year at one of the better institutions of higher knowledge in the U.S., I no longer have unadulterated access to the fictional worlds I used to live in. It is a bittersweet paradox that, choosing often the world of fiction over reality as children, we do not realize the value of the fictive worlds we are able to live in so utterly. It is only upon growing up, and no longer being able to drown out reality to the same extent, and live so whole-heartedly and vicariously through other worlds, that we realize what we lost, and what we had. I no longer have time for books – not in the way I once did. Reading has receded to the borders of my life, pushed outward relentlessly by the varied pressures and requirements of undergraduate life, and life in general. I’ve gone a month within reading a single book – a fate I would have considered impossible at age ten or fourteen.

Yet I’m not concerned that I will lose books entirely. Rather, the frenetic pace and minimalist lifestyle that being a college student seems to engender has forced me to redefine what I see as my relationship to those fictive worlds – how I fit books into both my schedule and my identity. These days, it’s mostly fantasy and chick lit that I read – desperate to escape the mental challenges of the academic life, I turn to books less to reaffirm my love of literature, or to submit myself to an author in order to learn something about life or love or writing, than to simply escape, as wholly as I can, into someone else’s vision. When that urge arises it’s not the complex machinations of Tolstoy’s novels that I want to be faced with but rather the frenzy of finding a proper husband for a marriageable young woman, or the clearly sketched wars between good and evil in fantasy worlds in which magic is a living force. Summers, I engulf myself in Tolstoy and poetry and Jhumpa Lahiri while I can, knowing that my time to spend with them is all too short. Once back, I let impulse dictate what it is I choose to read in the few cornered hours that remain free. Genre is unimportant – all that I need is that sense of fictional worlds seeping over into mine, with all their vivid wonder.

It took college to teach me that as much as I enjoy picking and choosing, rifling through book lists and favorite author bibliographies and Booker-prize winners to find the books which fit my kinks, it is ultimately the mere act of reading that keeps me going. Books are not necessary to sustain human life, or even the human spirit – I’ve never believed that. But there is an intimacy, an ownership to the act of reading that I’ve found almost nowhere else. Opening a book is like sipping a mug of hot tea – there’s a sense of power in the choice to drink, and a sense of submission in the willingness to take in, but above and beyond there’s a profoundly personal nature to it – the feel of the mug in your hands, its warmth on your fingers, the knowledge that no one else will ever drink this particular cup of tea in the same way you do. Books are like this – eloquent, interacting directly with you. Unlike a football game or even a film, books are profoundly individual experiences, rather than audience experiences (both their greatest strength and greatest weakness), which means that no matter how far I stray they’ll be waiting for me when I turn around. Waiting to be opened, tasted, submitted to, engulfed. Books will always be a part of my world – an intrinsic part, which I will return to again and again, and an elusive, necessary warmth at the borders of my life.

A Unique Approach to First Impressions

by Jacob Klein

_

A natural part of human nature is to judge someone when you first see him. Now, it’s not necessarily the kindest or most proper thing to do, but we need to face it, the majority of us (excluding those wonderful individuals who are pure of heart) judge people on first impressions. We all judge on different criteria. Some people judge others based on their clothing choice, their hairstyle, how they present themselves, or a combination of all those things. Granted, I do all of those at times as well, but I have another way to judge people: Converse.

Now before we get all worked up about how judging is bad, I just want to remind you that it really is a part of human nature and we should accept it. Sometimes, it can lead you down bad roads, so make sure to keep yourself open to changing your judgment when you need to. But back to Converse.

I believe that Converse—yes, as in the shoes—say a lot about a person. A pair of Converse can reveal whether someone has a rebellious spirit (high-tops, black), if he or she is an artiste (a bold color, possibly tweaked by wearer) or if that person just does not care (worn and used). As soon as I see someone wearing a pair of Converse, I immediately start forming impressions that will eventually lead to a judgment based on these criteria: type, color, and condition.

A quick refresher for those who may not be up on Converse styles: the two basic kinds are low-tops and high-tops, low-tops cutting off where most other shoes do and high-tops extending above the ankles. Other kinds include knee high Converse or Converse boots, Converse heels—yes, they exist, even though they shouldn’t—and a variety of other types. However, for sake of convenience, I’ll stick to low-tops and high-tops. Low-tops are more mainstream, a little more accessible to the average person. High-tops on the other hand tend to be worn by people who live an edgier life—or at least want to. A low-top can blend in easier if it must, looking like many other shoes, more similar to Vans or Hurley or some other company. High-tops, unless hidden by a pair of pants, stand out. They proclaim, “I am different, even in a slight way, from the rest of you.” And yes, sometimes this comes off in a derogatory way. Some people with high-tops wear them to just show that they enjoy living in certain extremes, but in a pleasant way. Others wear high-tops to proclaim their rebel status in smug superiority. I, for one, don’t appreciate looking down upon people, so I often ignore those who wear their pair of Converse for this reason. Though I don’t like to just blatantly ignore someone, there was one time when I was at a friend’s party that I had to do just that. I saw this guy across the room that I didn’t know, and departing from my usual course, I decided not to introduce myself to him because of his pair of high-tops. He wore them with an arrogance declaring what a maverick he was, so I chose to avoid his cocky maverick status.

Color leaves the most up to interpretation. In the Converse world, there is a near infinite number of possibilities of colors. You can mix and match by custom order, find a pair of your favorite color, or even different textures, or go with classic black. And that doesn’t even take into account how faded the color(s) may have become. The classic black is plain without the negative connotation. It’s simple but evocative, basic but bold. It says, “I enjoy Converse.” For some, it can be that black goes with anything, but for others it can be a declaration that they don’t need choose a color to proclaim their individuality. Which brings me to variation on color. As wonderful as black is, everyone has it, and sometimes people need to be unique, but then, once everyone is “unique,” no one is. The need to express one’s self is understandable, and that expression helps other people judge you. Colors are very open for interpretation, but at the same time, certain colors simply give rise to certain feelings. Bright yellow reveals a sunny disposition, red can be a bold statement of rebellion or the allowance of wearing a favorite color and completing an outfit. For instance, a friend of mine once displayed her recent purchase of red Converse adorning them along with a red shirt and a pair of jeans. I enjoyed her pleasure at getting to devote her entire outfit to red. A forest green says, “I’m deep and strong,” whereas normal green can reveal a happy person who also can be serious, such as a guy I saw who, though at first seemed like a joker, made sure his friends didn’t cross the street as a car came hurtling across the crosswalk. Complex enough when it’s only one color, imagine how tricky it can be when someone decides to mix two, or even three! With colors, it’s really an intuition thing.

The final piece of criteria is the condition of the pair of Converse. Those who keep their pair in prime condition without a single blemish can reveal haughtiness to their character or they could just be one of those people who gets lucky and always manages to stay clean and polished. Signs of wear can reveal a love for their shoes, and perhaps love for life as well, or the worn condition could be a put-on to show how someone’s lack of care and nonchalance.

I am a proud owner of a pair of bright blue (my favorite color) low-top Converse that I consider to be in a “vagabond” condition, worn, tearing, and dirty, but oh so loved. Though now a size too small, due to constant wear they still fit perfectly. They’ve lasted me through the darkest nights when I questioned my very being to the happiest times when I was filled with bubbly glee. And, when I finally get a new pair of Converse shoes, it’s more than likely I’ll choose bright blue low-tops again…but I think I’ll keep the ones I have.

Judge me however you see fit.