Requiem for My Memory

They say you have to be an avid reader to be a good writer. I like to read, but all the reading in the world does little good if what you read tends to vanish from your brain like a fart in a typhoon. Once, while sorting through old e-mail correspondence, I discovered that I had one year previously read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I had no memory of it. I don’t mean that I had forgotten the names of the characters or the subplots or even the theme of the book; I had no memory of ever even picking up the damn thing. Now, while forgetting a Virginia Woolf novel didn’t exactly bring me to tears – in fact I’m hoping I’ll soon lose the memory of To the Lighthouse and eventually of Virginia Woolf’s very existence – the experience did give me pause.

I seem to remember that I once had a pretty good memory, but obviously I can’t be sure. In fact, I may have played an active part in the destruction of it, and not just by constantly bombarding my brain with various nerve poisons over the past two decades. A movie nerd since childhood, I have since high school tried to remember the name of every actor I ever saw. Before the advent of IMDB, my brother and I actually compiled a filmography of all the actors we knew. By the time we gave it up (sometime in our twenties when we finally discovered girls), the list had around 1,700 names on it, and they were all more or less committed to memory. I’ve learned many more since then, and given, say, six hours I could probably mention 2,000 actors. My fear is that I have clogged my brain with this wonderfully useless knowledge. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but something sure has fucked up my cognitive powers.

The funny thing is that we’re not talking about a complete meltdown; at times I will scare myself and everyone around me with the shit I can remember by association. Case in point: While I was writing this, a friend asked me on MSN if I remembered an old computer game with a character who had gigantic testicles and drove them around in a wheel barrel. I instantly remembered the name of the game, “Viz”, and that it had another character called Johnny Fartpants. Why the hell do I remember this when I can’t remember the name of someone I was introduced to one minute ago? Maybe that’s got something to do with the difference between long and short term memory, but why then do I remember Buster Gonads and Johnny Fartpants and not who was king of Denmark a mere two centuries ago or the melting point of nitrogen or most other things I learned in school? Some will say that you remember what’s important to you. These people are, of course, assholes. You can’t tell me it wasn’t important to me to know what was and was not a lyrical poem during my exam in English literature when I came up against fucking Milton. Then there is that most annoying grandmotherish adage, “If it’s important, it will come back to you.” Well, fuck you, grandma! I bet you never found yourself in a dark part of Poland trying to get money from an ATM with an upside-down keypad only to realize that your PIN has long since migrated from your actual memory to your muscle memory.

What is most painful of all is, of course, the loss of great ideas to a shitty memory. I should say of allegedly great ideas, since, ipso facto, you will never know the true quality of a lost idea. I tend to get my best ideas for writing in very inconvenient situations like when I’m trying to go to sleep at night. I have learned that that is one type of situation where sleeping on it is the worst thing you can do. If you’re lucky, you’ll wake up the next morning having forgotten that you even had a good idea. Mostly, however, you will spend that entire day cursing yourself and wracking your brain to no avail. Immediate action is required, and for that reason I have decided to always carry a notepad around with me. What is pathetically obvious is that I will usually forget to bring it.