Over the course of our lives we ask similar questions of ourselves. We wonder about the forces that have shaped who we have become. We worry about what might have been. We search for explanations, try identifying the extent to which we control our destinies. What is my relationship to a friend, family member, lover, to my ancestors? We consider our own histories, realizing that in all memory resides the pasts of others.
Sitting down together, turning on the digital recorder, knowing that I am searching for a past I can’t remember, has unleashed a flood of memory in my sister. I expect Kinta to continue talking about touch and maternal attachment. I am ready to offer what I’ve discovered about memory, neurotransmitters, the look of an eye. But she changes the subject from absence to a life-threatening event. I wonder if her mind hasn’t somehow formed an association between her conflicted attachment to Mom and a sense of being surrounded by ever-present danger.
“Do you remember that man? I think he was a sailor. You don’t remember him?”
I shake my head and scan my mind, hoping that talking to my sister will somehow jar something loose. But I have no idea what she’s talking about.
Kinta starts telling me a story from when she was about fifteen and I was seven or eight. She explains how clear the memory is, as if it had happened yesterday, though there are details she doesn’t want to say, or doesn’t herself know. Did she open the door on the man having sex with our mother, or did she hear him beating her up, and that’s why she asked him to leave?
“‘You got to leave,’ I said. And Mom was passed out. I mean drunk. Incoherent, in her slip, lying across the bed. And for some reason he left. And for some reason, I don’t know, I locked the door.”
She pauses.
“We always left the front door open, but something told me to lock the door.”
Kinta looks down for a moment. She seems a bit older now, a bit faded.
“And he came back. He came back.
“‘I left my wallet in your mother’s room,’ the man said.
“‘Well, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and get it.’
“But the sailor needed his wallet. ‘Open the door, Goddammit.’
“‘I’ll go back and look for it,’ I told him. And I went and looked, and I couldn’t find it. I even looked under the bed. Mom was just lying there, passed out. And something told me not to unlock that door. And he left. And he never came back. He never came back.
“You don’t remember?” she asks me again, hoping the story has jogged my memory. She seems amazed I have no recollection of this threatening man in our house.
“No, I have no memory of this at all. But I have only very few memories of childhood.” I reel off the half-dozen memories scattered across my mind. Most often they feel more like sensations or feelings, barely discernable images devoid of context.
Kinta is surprised. I only told her about my memory problems when I began digging into my own past and the origins of forgetting, though each time we talk she seems perplexed anew, as if it is the first time that I have shared the fact that much of my childhood has simply fallen into some sort of abyss. How could I not remember, she wonders? Kinta’s worry has been that I have too much memory, not too little, that her “baby” brother was scarred by an excess of experience. She imagines me as overwhelmed by memory; it seems only natural that I became a historian.
Her mind gushes with memory, going back all the way to when she was a little girl living outside Houston and Mom found a rattlesnake sunning itself by the kitchen door. Kinta can reel off one story after another, little histories really, of Houston, Mississippi, New Orleans, dressing up dolls, make-believe games, childhood adventures, the lovingly immutable relationship with her younger sister, Sabrina. She finds solace in memory and sisterhood stories. Sibling relationships become narratives of comradeship and solidarity in those years when everything else seemed to be falling apart.
I envy Kinta. She has memory to spare, like the memoirs I’ve been reading where the past is as clear as the time it happened. She has what neuropsychologists call an exquisite episodic memory, the perception of “things past” and the ability to bring into conscious awareness moments that define a life. My mind seems nearly blank in comparison, like a sheet of crumpled-up white paper.
Part of me wants to turn didactic, professorial. Mom’s alcoholism and depression, her anger at everyone, shaped the bond between mother and child. Certainly Mom touched you and held you, even if you can’t recall an instance. An image of the past stands as a story, the absence of touch a metaphor for an absent mother. My sister’s feeling is not a fiction, even if it is not entirely true. She knew then, as she knows now, that in the 1950s our mother began retreating from her role as a caregiver as her life collapsed into disorder and despair. All these stories, this surfeit of memory, are not facsimiles of some objective reality. They are important precisely because they are stories. Each is a small history of her self.
A past exists in the simple statement “I am.” Personhood has its own particular history. Children begin developing a sense that they are someone around the age of five. At nearly the same time, they form an idea that time moves irrepressibly forward. They become little historians and memoirists, telling stories of cause and effect, of who they are, and how the world came to be, however fanciful their imaginations. We come to live by these images of the past.
Before this entrance into a world of time and becoming, the boundaries between self and other remain indistinct. There is no time, just a constant state of being, in which the baby remains a part of the mother. The child lives inextricably tied to the world, awash with sensation and free from time’s arrow. The joys and sorrows of others, including and perhaps most importantly the parents, are their own. We are one with our mother or caregivers, no matter who they are. These early sensibilities may be related to the functioning of what scientists have described as “mirror neurons,” which reproduce or simulate actions taking place in another organism—a smile, a tear, a funny face. The neural basis of imitation and empathy remains unclear, and research on mirror neurons is very controversial. What seems more certain is that the baby’s brain acts as if the performance of someone else’s body is its own. We begin our lives a part of others in a state of timelessness. This may be why the feeling of empathy seems to suspend time; identifying with someone’s emotions or their situation returns us to that original oneness.
Order unfolds as we seek relationships, beginning with simple imitation. Patterns materialize. Mental pictures arise. Repetition helps create the long-term memories that become the repository from which we tell the story of our lives, assigning importance to particular recollections while demoting others.
Becoming a person, however, means being alone as well as living amongst others. We know something of how this process unfolds within a child’s brain. There is a burst of neuronal development followed by a pruning. The brain cuts out what it considers unused and unimportant. An age of exuberance recedes like the afterglow of an exploding star, present if invisible to our conscious senses.
Within certain limitations, the brain is historically constituted, the external world shaping the development and relationships among and between neurons. In a sense our brains are like an archive, where material is well-preserved and properly catalogued, but also dissolves, or becomes re-shelved or misplaced, or in some cases never makes it there to begin with. Time is deposited within us, as the brain is also constantly interpreting the external world. This historically created brain and the self emerge in tandem. We tend to think of the self as something concrete and fixed and not as a process emerging from our awareness of experience. We want to say that the self is a kind of private property that we, and only we, own, so we can point to someplace in our brains and say the self resides “there.”
There is a relationship between this historically made brain and the self as a story unfolding along an axis of time. Our sense of being emerges as if creating a story, much as a historian fashions a cohere
nt narrative explaining a process or development. Through history telling, in the words we begin using, the child integrates experience, consolidates memory, and develops a consciousness of self, even if that self in some respects is always a fiction. Like language, the self struggles to prove its truth, marching toward a point forever disappearing in the distance.
We now have a sense of the neurological basis of the self. Neuroscientists interested in memory’s creation have focused considerable attention on the amygdalae and hippocampi. The amygdalae play an important role in storing stressful moments and are related to instinctual memory around danger and fear. The hippocampi, more newly evolved structures within the brain, allow us to fix experiences in place and time. They are central to the creation of declarative and autobiographical memory, the ability to be one’s own storyteller, a historian of our selves. Without the hippocampi there can be no self, no society, no culture, no history-telling. The two structures operate in tandem. Chemicals like cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline cascade through the amygdalae and hippocampi and across our brains, particularly the prefrontal cortex and the language centers, enabling me to type these words and Virginia Woolf and countless artists and writers to explore the paradoxes of our being.
Powerful or traumatic events can alter or even hijack this process. Traumatic memories stored in the amygdalae produce bodily experience and shape perception, from the sweat that automatically appears, to the chemicals rushing through my body causing panic whenever I see my mother. Should I run away every time I see her, every time I feel her presence within me? Trauma obliterates time. The memory is never past. My mother’s suicide attempt remains timeless amidst all my forgetting. This is because stress hormones mold the way we create vivid and rich pictures of our lives. Trauma trips up the elaborate choreography of being, even as that single event dances on and on. The result is one kind of amnesia, reducing everything around that original experience to gray haze, as if nothing else happened. For the soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the war never ends.
Severe trauma quite literally destroys parts of the hippocampi, making it difficult for someone to tell the story of their lives. Depression does much the same thing, shrinking the hippocampi and altering the ways we remember, describe, and interact with the world. At its insidious worst, depression destroys the self, leaving one with the sense of simultaneously being devoured and disavowed by one’s past. Writers and artists have depicted depression as a kind of dissolution, as if their minds were literally breaking apart, as if their selves were somehow slipping away. The paradox of the self—identifiable yet impermanent, nonexistent though obviously there—may also explain why so much art, particularly the modern novel, has been preoccupied with how we become who we are.
Childhood trauma related to chronic amnesia seems to involve experiences that simply overrun the child’s ability to order or assimilate the external world. These experiences typically are repeated over the course of early lives, in addition to punctuated extraordinary events, and they shape the evolving brain. The hippocampi atrophy. The past possesses these people because they cannot yet put into words what, as a child, overwhelmed them, nor can they summon the richly detailed world within which their young lives unfolded. Memory is both insistent and missing or subsumed, an “impossible history.”
I became myself around the time my mother wanted to die. I saw in her eyes anguish and despair, emotions I considered my own. One consequence was childhood depression. At least that’s what people have told me.
“You were a very sad child.”
“You looked kind of abandoned, like you were walking around in state of shock.”
“You were in trouble.”
“You had PTSD.”
Or “these forms of stimulation are unhealthy for the young brain.”
Or “as a child it was impossible to understand everything that was happening around you, which you couldn’t control, couldn’t possibly understand as a young child. Your mother was an alcoholic and in such crisis. And you were surrounded by adult sexuality, your mother’s cravings, the men, your sisters … [and] you so wanted your mother’s love. And you were so disappointed.”
Or “it appears there’s nothing there. The slot inside your brain is empty.”
I still dream that I will tell a story of my self that contains the full richness of experience—a moving picture instead of a few scattered images. I will take from others enough information to create memories of boyhood dramas, school scenes, adventures, plans about what I would be when I grew up, relationships with parents and siblings. I will mold collective memory into personal testimony. Language will fill in the spaces where my body has been.
I can’t stop hoping that there are memories inside of me that somehow are unavailable but that with enough effort will be revealed like a sunken ship brought to the surface. The past will become incarnate, though I also tell myself it is forever lost. I am wasting my time trying to figure out something, anything, and this appointment with the past may well destroy me. I will show up, but no one will be there. I will sit down and wait and slowly waste away.
I think for a moment about the play Oedipus Rex, wondering if Freud had it all wrong. The play’s not about sex or incest, or at least not only. It’s a history lesson, a cautionary tale. Oedipus wants to find out what happened, why an as yet unknowable past is determining his life. He’s on a quest for knowledge, the facts that will finally put everything in order, the continuities that comprise human tragedy.
“Don’t do it,” the Muses warn Oedipus, “this is a history that is beyond comprehension, beyond language itself.”
“I have to,” Oedipus insists. “I must know. I must transform the past into memory.”
“No, Oedipus, this is man’s fatal desire, his wish to order the unmasterable. What you want exceeds the capacity of irresolute mortals. You won’t be able to bear witness to your past. There is no amnesty in memory, only the shaming recognition of man’s flawed being.”
It’s not a crime that destroys Oedipus, or some broken taboo. Oedipus didn’t know that he’d slept with his mother or killed his father. It is knowledge that blinds Oedipus. Putting things in order, assembling all the evidence along time’s stubborn arc, finally telling his impossible history, is simply too much.
Kinta’s voice draws me out of my head.
“I fantasized all the time,” she says—dreams of finding riches buried in the backyard, wealth that would make amends, men who would be kings. She would live with Dad on the Gulf Coast, just the two of them. They would fish off the Bay St. Louis Bridge, dipping cane poles into the water looking for croakers, trout, and sheepshead, pulling up nets filled with blue crab, drinking ice-cold Cokes from a Styrofoam chest. In summer evenings they would wade through the warm shallows looking for flounder beneath the custard-yellow light of a Coleman lantern, the tide running around their legs.
“Sometimes I just don’t know what’s a fantasy and what’s a memory. You know … a real memory.” Kinta looks at me, hoping my research might help her arrange the jumble of sensations that course through her.
“I listened to so many stories. They feel like I really experienced them. I can’t tell if I heard them, or if I was really there, part of the story.”
A worry befalls her. There is something dangerous in this work of memory. The compulsion to unravel what seems authentic from what might be fantasy leaves her feeling exposed, even diminished. She seems to be beholden to some impossible task, obeying some ancient injunction impelling her to organize all these feelings and recollections, to separate a daughter’s unrequited dreams of a perfect father from sitting together on a bridge watching a float bob up and down on bronzed waters.
It’s a Sisyphean task.
“Maybe the stories you heard as a child and your fantasies, and what you really witnessed and today remember, aren’t so far apart,” I am tempted to say between her tears and sips of ice water. “And our dreams are also the facts of our lives, every
bit as true and often more powerful than the empirical events we think we can so easily document.” But this would come across as hurtful, or patronizing, or both. And I wonder if I’m not being hypocritical. It’s the facts I am looking for after all, the concrete evidence I keep telling myself will somehow put things in order.
Kinta switches the topic slightly, telling me how she had to escape from New Orleans, even if it meant leaving us behind. She seems to want to talk about sexuality, her own and our mother’s. It seems a way of speaking to her feelings of vulnerability in those years around the divorce, when Kinta was trying to make sense of herself and the desires of men, and our mother’s sexual hungers and endless disappointments. Kinta knew she was headed down the wrong road, staying out all night, hitchhiking around the city, making out with boys who drove too fast and boasted too quickly about drinking nickel beers at Two Jays on Governor Nicholls. It was just a matter of time before she would lose her virginity and, soon after that, become pregnant, Marie warned her—Kinta would end up like her or worse, with a baby hanging from her hip, the toilet filled with dirty nappies, the loneliness of young motherhood.
She was only thirteen then, with tanned skin and hair as dark and shiny as anthracite that ended in fishhook curls that hung around a child-woman’s body. She’d developed breasts early and had a preternatural beauty that made her seem older and worldlier than her years. Her looks drove boys wild. Kinta liked necking, and she French-kissed until the muscles in her mouth grew sore. Sometimes she would let their hands sneak under her top. But they were all only boys, she knew, with their cars and music and doggedness—none promised much of a future.
Running around New Orleans at all hours of the night had its thrills, and it kept Kinta away from our mother. By the time she got home Mom would be in her slip passed out on the bed. Kinta would make herself a sandwich and slide into her room. But my sister knew that everything was happening too soon, too quickly. She needed some direction, some escape from the chaos. She needed a parent. A few months after the divorce was finalized Kinta got on the Greyhound bus and joined Dad in Mississippi.
History Lessons Page 9