Memories And Mythos
Our Memories Lie To Us. And That’s A Good Thing.
M. D. Kwak
“SOME PEOPLE SAY history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicentre only to return again, one circle removed.”
Ocean Vuong’s epistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a blending of fiction and memoir, a piece of writing that is not only lyrically beautiful but infinitely sensitive in capturing the small moments, like the flow of tears or awkward silences that characterise our human condition.
The past refuses to die. It is an imprint that remains in our interiority for us to relive and re-experience with all its passionate vitality and grief until our minds fail us, until the distance from that epicentre becomes too great for us to meaningfully return to. But Vuong’s imagery of memory as being a circular journey, not only hints at its periodicity but also its gradual deterioration – how memory, as time goes on, becomes increasingly divorced from the truth, instead being redrawn into the realms of fiction and distortion.
He goes on to write:
“Shifts in the narrative occur – the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are travelling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”
Memories are a human creation.
They’re a mythos that our minds fashion from the truth, and then imbue with our fluctuating emotions and arbitrary selectiveness. Now, mythos is an interesting word to describe memories as. Mythos, I think, entails two things. The first concerns subjectivity; a mythos is a traditional, recurring narrative, a set of beliefs. The second concerns causation; mythology attempts to make sense of the unknown and bring certainty into our fragile lives.
Memories are the aggregate of the individual human narrative.
They’re what we believe happened in our past, and, by extension, what we believe reality to be. The past, maybe entirely, informs our present, by which point the present becomes our past. A recurrence series into infinity driven entirely by perception and human subjectivity.
But it’s a recurrence that we can control.
Memories are a coping mechanism.
When faced with the horrors of life, the human ego protects itself under a veil constructed by lies. Lies of memories. Lies about the past.
These horrors of life don’t always have to be horrific abuse or trauma and its accompanying symptoms of dissociative amnesia. They’re often more ‘mundane’: an awkward interaction with an acquaintance, an embarrassing public situation, an unreciprocated first love – cumbersome and cringey.
Humans are selective about memories. We remember happy memories, locking them away in a vault to relive later on, and we try to forget painful ones, masquerading as if they never even occurred. Such imperfection is how our psyche survives, heals, and moves on, insulated from the infinite complexity and ‘what ifs?’ of the past, which crowd out any opportunity to live in the present moment.
But beyond a simple binary of permitting certain memories and denying others, the human mind also distorts memory, making the awkward moments a little less awkward in retrospect. Or perhaps it’s the rose-tinted lens people put on to look at the ordinary moments from their past, and fondly remember them as being the most passionate times of their lives (even if it was only high school).
Our memories create myths about ourselves, about the people we love. They’re how we delude ourselves into believing that we’re good people or that all of our friends love us – even if such convictions are mere fantasy.
Memories are perfectly imperfect.
But just because our memories are imperfect doesn’t automatically mean we are. I think there’s something human about infallibility, something comforting about the lies that shield us from truths too painful to bear.
There’s relentless progress towards a world which outsources memory to AI and seeks to perfect the art of recollection by means of social media preservation and ubiquitous video footage.
But memories that eventually deteriorate, that change with our emotions, and gently erase the worst parts of our life, remind us that we are human in a way that is simultaneously anxiety-inducing yet life-affirming. It reminds us that we are creatures of emotions and stories and not just machines run by data and precision, an enervating narrative that has become increasingly proliferated by cynics.
I dread the day when the machination of science perfects our “subpar” memory and makes recollection of the past, a seamless and entirely accurate process. From that point on, the past will entirely subsume our present. We will obsess over things that have already occurred. We will endlessly re-experience past moments of euphoria but abandon creating new memories filled with different kinds of joys. We will never allow ourselves to forget our traumas and incessantly re-watch our most haunting moments of despair and regret, as though it were the horror movie of our own lives. Human memory is limited, and that’s exactly what makes our lives bearable and perhaps even – beautiful because of, not despite, its imperfections.