Memory and Memoirists Part I: Aristotle Had a Point
If you’re writing a memoir, you are working with memory.
But what is memory? Humans have used every possible discipline—philosophy, literature, psychology, biology, film, computer science—to explore this question, and we can use their work to understand better how we can use memory when we write.
In this post, I’ll focus on one of our oldest descriptions of memory, from Aristotle’s “On Memory and Reminiscence,” written more than 2,300 years ago. In that treatise, Aristotle argued that memory is “neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time.”* To paraphrase, memory isn’t our physical experience or our thoughts, but a related product of one of those things formed inside us when time passes.
Aristotle understood that memory happens through a process: that we exist in a moment, pass through that moment, and then turn that moment into something related to but separate from the moment itself. It’s an adaptation of the experience, and as with any adaptation, the original text has been interpreted and transformed. This definition is useful for us when we write about the past because it differentiates between the lived experience and our memory of it and acknowledges that memories are different from but equally valid versions of what we lived.
Sometimes we are tempted to hold a memory too tightly: we want to call it absolute, concrete, indistinguishable from the lived moment. Doing so inhibits our ability to consider the context of what happened, to accept that we interpret our lived experiences, and to acknowledge that others’ memories may differ yet still be legitimate. That’s not to say that facts don’t exist (the rug was red, he hit you, she ate the last piece of cake, you were joyful, etc.) but our memories, though created by facts, do not contain all the facts, all the reality—they have been transformed into something else.
On the other hand, sometimes we can hold memory too loosely. We write out a memory with too much hesitation—or we don’t write it out at all—because we believe it isn’t strong enough or definitive enough, or we worry we’ll never get across to readers what it was really like. But memory isn’t the actual experience, and we can’t recreate the actual moment through writing about it. Just as the passing of time transforms the lived moment into a memory, so we by writing about a memory are transforming the memory into words that connect us to our readers. And that’s enough.
Aristotle’s definition, that a memory is an experience formed by time into an adaptation of the original, should therefore free us as memoirists to both investigate our memories and to write about them confidently. We can take a specific event and ask questions that will help us shape our writing about it:
What do we remember right now, easily?
What do we remember if we push a little further into the event?
Where are the limits of what we remember—temporally, emotionally, sense-wise, thought-wise?
What other memories does this initial memory lead us to?
What recurring thoughts and feelings do we connect to that event?
What questions does the memory raise?
How has our attitude to that event changed over time?
What can we do to explore that event more?
What are the surprising blank spots in the memory?
When did we last bring up this memory?
How have we talked about or otherwise used this memory?
As memoirists, we will always be trying to understand our memories better. Aristotle’s “On Memory and Reminiscence” (which also talks about how we are able to recall our memories) is a great place to start.
In my next post, I’ll talk about what neuroscience tells us about the nature of memory.
*Aristotle. “On Memory and Reminiscence.” Trans. J.I. Beare. Annals of Neuroscience. 2010 Apr; 17(2): 87–91. National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4116998/.