on the betrayal of memory

Surfing the Passage of Time

In all of my memoir workshops, I teach a Mark Doty essay on how memory changes with time, and the knowledge that what we remember of what happened back there is not wrong, although it may be uniquely ours, and therefore differ from the memories of others. I often get questions about how I could possibly remember the things that I write about in such minute detail; sometimes, depending on where it’s coming from, the implication is that it’s being fabricated. Sometimes the question is innocuous and people just want to know (I have synesthesia, like many memoirists, but also, Pain engraves a deeper memory, wrote Anne Sexton).

What happens, though, when we go back and look at something fifty years later and it isn’t the same? Which memory do we honor? Either way, though, the memoirist is (generally) not lying nor are they committing a sin when they write about a place in a certain manner, go back and visit it, and it has or has not changed. Perception and perspective morph with the years, and they count.

In my experience, when we visit a place we knew as a child, that place inevitably feels much smaller: buildings now look like they belong in Disneyland, where everything is three-quarter-size, to accommodate a child’s perspective. If places don’t come to us that way — built for young eyes, bodies, and brains — then we’re automatically plunged into a sort of dream-state bigness, an outsized and vague discomfort like a size four foot clomping around in a size eight loafer. But it’s not only about place, is it; it may be that a person we remember one way was actually not that way at all. They have changed because we have also changed; we are seeing them through a gray filter of experience, making it different to locate the edges of a narrative the way we do when we’re building a jigsaw puzzle.

It used to be that memories were all we ever had to go on, and the only way we could unpack our stories and find those edges. Sometimes we corroborate our memories with others, and sometimes we use other devices — I no longer have relationships with many of the people in my family, so I go by photos, letters, diary entries — but no matter what we use, it’s all in service of one thing: getting to our truth, trusting it, honoring it. One of the other devices, whether we like it or not, is social media.

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I keep thinking that there must be a word for this in Scots Gaelic, or maybe in Welsh — something like hiraeth, which has no direct English translation and means, loosely, a longing or homesickness for something that has departed. I have seen it in a few places described as a tug on the heart; it has been widely used as a meme. Something that has departed, I believe, can also mean the memory of someone who at one time made you feel one way, and then, with more information in your possession and perhaps many years of therapy, made you feel another.

I used to wonder whether this was one of the positive aspects of the early days of Facebook: we searched for and found those we loved and somehow lost to time and distance. Even now, we discover the deaths of people from whom we have drifted. With the help of the algorithm, we subconsciously taxonomize and time-stamp memory and emotion by year, place, and age. We click on MEMORIES to see what we were doing on this day last year, the year before, and the year before that. We’re reminded of birthdays that otherwise live in the fissures of our middle-aged hippocampi. We’re thrown together with grade school, middle school, high school friends we haven’t seen in forty years; we come together under the rubric of shared experience, and this is where things can get murky.

I grew up in Forest Hills, New York just outside Manhattan in the sixties and seventies; I left for college in Boston in 1981. From the day I started nursery school until the day I packed my bags for college, I went through every grade with nearly the same people. So when we all found ourselves on Facebook in 2007, my elementary school classmates — the same thirty people — posted our annual class pictures. There we were in 1969, 1970, 1972, 73, 74, 75. There were our memories, right in front of us: the time our friend Ira Elliot (now the drummer for the band Nada Surf) played Harold Hill in our sixth grade production of The Music Man. The Spring Festivals held outside in the schoolyard every late April. The teachers: our lovely fifth grade teacher, and one of the few male teachers on the staff. The first grade teacher whose Allen Ginsburg lookalike husband collected our jeans and tie-dyed them in their apartment bathtub.

Every class photo garnered long threads of comments within seconds of their posting. The girl who sat next to me — both our last names begin with A and we were both diminutive — and I were suddenly back in touch; the girl I played with in the schoolyard showed up at one of my signings for Poor Man’s Feast. Two other girls — both hilarious even as kids — engaged me in conversation. But when our fourth grade class photo was posted: silence.

Someone finally broke it: our teacher had been an unholy terror. She undermined confidence, made everyone cry as a rule, and was generally so foul-tempered that my classmates and I pleaded with our parents to let us stay home sick at least once a week. As for me, she singlehandedly destroyed any shred of confidence I might have ever had in doing math. When I saw the photo of her on Facebook, a tiny bead of sweat rolled down my back. She was vicious; I was ten years old. I had nightmares about her. She was cruel in a sort of neo-Victorian, Tom Brown’s School Days manner: cool, unsmiling, often soft-spoken, until she wasn’t. She was not an eraser-thrower or a knuckle-rapper or a collar-grabber. This teacher was a character out of a Bond movie, with heavily shellacked bottle auburn hair that would not move in a Category Four hurricane. And she terrorized me. She terrorized all of us.

Can the traumatic fifty-one-year-old school memories of a group of thirty sixty-year-olds be that radically different from the truth of who this person actually was? Could we have been wrong?

On Facebook, my classmates chimed in: she had tormented us to the degree that one of us, a successful and brilliant woman who has launched six businesses, was diagnosed with a condition called dyscalculia, attributed to the repeated trauma of psychological and intellectual violence inflicted on her by this teacher. I didn’t even know that dyscalculia existed, but when my friend told me about the diagnosis, it made sense: when I left this teacher’s class in 1973, I was not the same person I was when I started. I loathed myself; I loathed anything I might become. I couldn’t pass a mirror without turning away. She told me I was a terrible human being when I couldn’t do a complicated math problem, and for years, I believed her. She said I was an idiot; she said we were all idiots. From that point forward, I failed nearly every math class I was forced to take, from geometry in high school to statistics in college. Checkbooks still make me shudder; the simplest of household equations make me physically sick. I write these words not to elicit sympathy, but to make clear: words matter. Fallout can upend lives, and in the case of me and my class, it did.

Our schooldays in grade school were seven and a half hours long. For seven and a half hours, five days a week for a year, minus lunch, we were in this teacher’s presence. We soaked up her rage like thirty prepubescent sponges. We were changed, viscerally, and to this day, we carry her hatred of us — of all children, it would seem — wherever we go, as though it has never changed. Because, effectively, it hasn’t. In this case, our memories have not been betrayed by time and experience. They’ve been frozen in place. This is our truth.

But: social media. When we discovered that she is a centenarian grandmother and great-grandmother many times over, and we managed to find pictures of her online, we had a collective physical response. I gasped when I realized that her granddaughter was an acquaintance, a distant family friend (with a different last name). In the current photos of my former teacher, I found myself deeply concerned for the beaming children who hovered around her in the photos. Everyone looked very happy. Were they? Only they know. Do they, like their grandmother, live bifurcated lives? Was she a monster only in the confines of the school — to other people’s children — and loving and doting once she got home? Did they even know?

Can the traumatic fifty-one-year-old memories of a group of thirty sixty-year-olds be that radically different from the truth of who this person actually was? Could we have been wrong?

A few years before I left for college, a troubled guy I used to know became physically abusive to his girlfriend, my friend, at a party. I remember his attacks often taking place in public. After college, my friend said he had stalked her: he followed her from one university to another to another. Eventually, I lost touch with my friend, and my memory of him, of them, remains preserved in time. Years later, he died in a tragic accident. The hundreds of online eulogies described him as a loving, kind, doting husband and father, quite religious, one of the most generous men they ever knew, widely loved by his community.

Which was the truth? Where does memory fit in? What does it adhere to? Does who he became invalidate my memory of who he was when we were teenagers? Does the image of my former teacher surrounded by glowing children invalidate my classmates’ memories of her? Does it betray it?

Can two opposing memories be true at the same time? Are we what and who we once were, or who and what we’ve become?

In Doty’s essay, he writes:

Odd, then, to think that I’d written a memoir in which I chose not to revisit the places of the past which, unlike Nabokov, I could. I could have found the sites of childhood scenes and interviewed relatives, seeking corrections or corroboration, but that wasn’t my book’s project. What interested me was memory itself, the architectures memory constructs, the interpretive act of remembering. There is a passage in a poem by Alfred Corn which says it beautifully:

The idea hard to get in focus
is not how things
Looked but how the look felt, 
then--and then, now. 

Perhaps this is at the core of it all: it’s less about the seeing — the buildings that have grown smaller with time; the sight of a teacher’s face that launched a night of private messages among people who have had successful lives and children of their own — and more about the connection between memory and the feeling it elicits in the gut, and the heart, and how those feelings stay with us forever.