Memory… is nothing else than a certain concatenation of ideas…
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
I.
A
while ago, I was going through my files when I came across a cache of
partly crumbled photographs. One was of me holding the sight box for the
M252 mortar in Garden City, N.Y., parking lot. In another, I sat with
Oum in the open hatch of a UH-1W at Camp White Horse, outside Nasiriyah,
Iraq. There was another of me and the guys at the 2003 Marine Corps
birthday ball. I looked like a boy in those photos. At the bottom of the
stack I found one photo of us standing with First Sgt. Allen. I was
wearing a set of borrowed Alphas; she wore a black evening gown, First
Sergeant stood adorned in dress blues, everyone was smiling, teeth
shining. I stared at it and whispered to myself, “very different times.”
I’d
forgotten about these photos, until one night when I was at her house
searching a shoebox and I came across the mangled photo album that had
stored them for years. They were all there, near the letters we had sent
each other while I was overseas. The photographs were wrinkled, crushed
and forgotten like the discarded notions that had once been the impetus
for “us.”
Very soon after, a sentiment of resentment splashed
with a bit of melancholy began to rise within me so I gathered them and
took them when I left.
The parking lot photo showed me standing
gaunt and blank wearing woodland camouflage the afternoon I left Garden
City for Camp Lejeune to prepare to go to Iraq. This was a picture of a
young man who was anxious about war but too indoctrinated to acknowledge
it. My photo was taken by the woman whom I had married months before,
certain that we would grow old together. The day she took my photo she
had worn indigo sweatpants, a canary yellow hooded sweatshirt and plain
white Converses. Her hair only lightly grazed her shoulders. As I looked
at myself in the photo, I began to remember that as the bus departed
Garden City that evening, what she had been wearing that day would
become my singular unaided recollection of her. From then, I would need a
photograph to remind me of the contours of her face. I was puzzled why
but time was too precious then to ponder such things. So I let the
question slip, promising myself to ask again at another juncture.
II.
I
had forgotten her facial features as soon as the bus started rolling.
As much as I tried to recall her face, it was as if I had never stored
it in the infinite expanse of my long-term memory. But this of course is
not true. I recall her face with ease now and I would describe it as
round, with high cheekbones and eyes brown and intensely intelligent.
She was then and is now quite beautiful. But the evening I left,
remembering such details became an exercise in both frustration and
futility.
 |
| Garden City, N.Y., 2003. |
As I began thinking about the answer to my question, I thought that it
would be helpful to first define what memory is, so I consulted a text
for an answer.
According to “Psychology,” a textbook by Schacter,
Gilbert and Wegner, “memories are the residue of [those] events, the
enduring changes that experience makes in our brains and leaves behind
when it passes.” According to the authors, “if an experience passes
without leaving a trace, it might just as well not have happened.” In a
sense, our memories define who we become.
Socrates describes memory “as a block of wax.”
Let
us say that the tablet is a gift of memory, the mother of the muses;
and that when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard,
or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and
thoughts, and in the material receive the impressions of them as from
the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as
long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be
taken, then we forget and do not know.
While Aristotle, speaking on memory and recollection, notes:
It is obvious, then, that memory belongs to that part of the souls to
which imagination belongs; all things which are imaginable are
essentially objects of memory and those which necessarily involve
imagination are objects of memory incidentally.
The lasting state of which we call memory- as a kind of picture; for the
stimulus produced impresses a sort of likeness of the percept, just as
when men seal with signet rings.
Hence in some
people, through disability or age, memory does not occur even under a
strong stimulus, as though the stimulus or seal were applied to running
water; while in others owing detrition like that of old walls in
buildings, or to the hardness of the receiving surface, the impression
does not penetrate. …
We must regard the mental
picture within us as both an object of contemplation in itself and as a
mental picture of something else.
But we did have
experiences that left behind traces that I could recall easily. The trip
we took around lower Manhattan on the Circle Line. The day we were
married. Us walking to the subway to take the No. 2 train the afternoon
of the West Indian Day parade in 2002. These were all pleasant days
that come to mind with out any retrieval cues and I believe that the
idea of a pleasant day has much to do with why it was so difficult for
me to remember her face that other day.
State dependent retrieval
is defined by Schacter, Gilbert and Wegner as the tendency for
information to be better recalled when the person is in the same state
during encoding and retrieval, or more simply when I tried to retrieve
an image of her face from that day filled with uncertainty and angst, I
found it hard to do so because for the most part, my most vivid memories
of her face up until that point included some sort of cheerful
experience. Certainly, that day my state of mind, and I suppose hers
too, was not the same as the day we were married. Still eight years
since, even as our relationship and marriage have collapsed, I find it
hard to remember more than what she wore for my grand sendoff and maybe
it is O.K. that that day an image of her face was not imprinted on my
block of wax.
III.
 |
| Kuwait, 2003. |
After the initial weeks of settling into Nasiriyah, the sergeants had
devised a structure for the platoon’s day to day operations. One day of
guard. One day spent patrolling. The third day spent as quick reaction
force a k a, the rest day. This cycle was repeated until the morning
that we left Iraq for Kuwait. That morning, Frank Sinatra’s “New York,
New York” streamed from our Humvees, moving us along like running
cadence. That morning I smelled the smoke from our burn pit which rose
from the desert like a date palm, for the final time and saw the men of
the Italian carabinieri sitting in front of the compound without cover
but not without cheerfulness. We waved to each other and I wondered how
they would manage the monotony and defend against complacency.
Routines
have a way of creating the impression of security. But in Nasiriyah one
had to be hypervigilant. One’s weapon had to remain serviced and
accessible. One never left the compound without a helmet or an
interceptor vest or an interpreter. One stayed on edge awaiting that
rare skirmish.
To relieve stress and pass time we would often
pontificate about how different life would be once we returned home. For
inspiration most of us relied on pictures of wives or girlfriends to
ignite recollections or to stimulate dreaming. I taped the picture of
her I’d fished from my cargo pocket in Garden City to the roof of my
Kevlar and over the months my sweat and the sun’s rays quickened its
fading. The morning that we left Nasiriyah, I shared this photo with an
Italian who shared with me his talisman, a picture of his small
daughter. He asked whether I had children and I said no, but we still
joked about how in the future my son would marry his daughter.
There
was scuttlebutt about Britain’s Royal Marines habitually burning all
traces of home before going into combat and I remember thinking how
stoic of them, but I could never bring myself to do it. I correlated her
fading image with my tenuous conception of home. I wanted to get home;
therefore I wanted to get to her. The photo was my talisman. I sealed it
inside a Ziploc bag to stave off continued deterioration and there it
stayed until I lost it.
In October I saw on the news that a
suicide bombing had occurred in Nasiriyah, not far from where we had
been relieved by the Italians, and that the bombing had killed more than
a dozen of them. Maybe the Brits had it right all along. What good is
sentimentality in the face of circumstance? I had not learned that
Italian’s name but that night I got on my knees and prayed for all of
them and for him and his family. I haven’t spoken with God in a while
but I truly hope that he heard that prayer.
IV.
 |
| The author and Oum, a fellow Marine, in Iraq, 2003. |
The problem with writing from memory is the problem of truth.
There
is a concern when writing nonfiction, autobiography, memoir etc…about
truth and relating truth to one’s readers. Truth, of course, is
paramount. The reader expects it and it is the writer’s obligation to
remain truthful to experience and memory but this notion of truth is not
truth with a capital T. It can never be.
In fact, the notion of
what is true will be colored by the author’s experience, perception of
that experience, his biases and his own fading memories. Stories
regardless of genre should be read with these parameters in mind. A
piece of nonfiction can never be truly devoid of untruths. What is
important is the author’s intention to relate the facts as he truthfully
recalls them and the readers’ acceptance of the limitation imposed by
nonfiction. Because our memories define who we become, when writing from
memory subjectivity though not ideal will color the writing. How one
perceives the self will undoubtedly inform how introspective a piece of
writing culled from traces of experiences will be.
V.
Several
days ago we sat at a diner to talk a few things over and she looked at
me squarely and asked, “Did we not have good times?” As I spread jam on
my toast, I thought back to the day we took the Circle Line, how at ease
she had looked. I thought to myself, “Yes, sometimes.” When the bill
came she insisted on paying her share, then we went our own ways.
The
next day, I bent to scrub soap scum from my bathtub, half kneeling,
half praying. I wanted to inter the unshaven face I regarded in the
mirror. I turned the tap and water splattered about the sink and a few
drops splashed haphazardly into the cup I was holding. Off. Water from
the cup rinsing the loosened soap scum was an earsplitting contrast to
life’s insufferable silence. If I succumb to the stillness, I thought…
but there is not a soul to talk to in the house except, me.
It was
late and the day had slipped unhurriedly by. I walked back into my
bedroom and looked down at the chaos of papers and photos strewn across
my bed and decided it was time to put it all away.
Maurice
Decaul served in the Marine Corps for nearly five years. He deployed to
Nasiriyah, Iraq, in 2003 as a squad leader with Weapons Company, 2nd
Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. He lives in Brooklyn and is studying at
Columbia University.
Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/memory-lapse/#more-111043
