As a writer of autobiographical prose, readers often ask me how it’s possible to remember events that have happened a long time ago. Most people can’t remember what they ate for breakfast last Monday, and they certainly can’t recall what they said to the bus driver that very same morning.
In my first memoir, Planet of the Blind, I recall scenes from my early childhood, moments when I first became aware that I was different from other people owing to my blindness. Although I have always been “legally blind” I’ve been able throughout my life to see impressionistically. If I can press my nose to something I can make it out. Do I see things exactly as they are? I’ll never know. My seeing is invariably wrong and yet surrealistically true. Here’s a moment in Planet of the Blind when I recall being in Helsinki, Finland at the age of 3:
“In Helsinki I lean close to the gray, birdlike women with ether eyes who ride the trams. Each has survived the wartime starvation, and now, in the darkest city on earth, they are riding home with their satchels, which had taken all day to fill; the stores were ill-stocked and the lines were long. I remember their almost feral attention to the trolley’s windows at twilight. As a small boy, I climb ever closer to them, their strangeness imprinting on me an indelible image of hardship.”
When I wrote this passage I was forty-three years old. The boy who rode the tram was three. Forty years separate the boy’s mind from the man’s—then again, maybe not? The boy’s mind does not in fact exist. In lyric terms it’s an elapsed fragment, a lost scroll, the oral tradition song that people failed to sing. Memory, especially early memory does not exist without a lyric structure.
I cannot rely on memory if it’s conceived as a series of time capsules buried by my former selves. The writer Rebecca West put it this way: “My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and play with it. I think your hand concentrates for you.”
It’s possible to argue that there is no memory outside of writing. I remember things by following my hand across the page. Writing, like all modes of composition depends on a weird marriage of luck and discernment. Writing is the petri dish wherein memories grow. The idea is unsettling. It’s like the discovery that there is no true green in nature. Memories do not exist without imagination.
How do I know if my memories are true? I don’t. This is where artistic method becomes important. The desire to remember and the desire to write must be understood as twin activities requiring critical attention. Chekov put it this way: “I can write only by thinking back; I have never written straight from nature. I need to let a subject strain through my memory until only what is important or typical remains as a filter.”
What a wonderful idea Chekov has! Memory can be thought of as a filter. Another way to look at this is to imagine that images from the past are only reliable when we catch them more than once. I must write my paragraph about the trolley ride more than once and pay attention to the repetitions and similarities in the imagery. One can think of this as a writer’s system of checkcks and balances: imagination is strained through netted memory, and invention is checked against the careful arrangings of similar images or “archetypes” as Carl Jung would call them. There are, it turns out, buried images that are too powerful for mere fancy. The gray, birdlike women with ether eyes are a substantive memory after forty plus years.
It’s important to notice that I don’t give these gray women oversized, ostrich feather hats, or lap dogs. It would be fun to transform these women through the sudden electrolysis of imagination. Suddenness is the imaginative thing that makes literature so appealing as a cure all for the commonplace. This is important for writers of nonfiction to understand. We must employ memory but with restraint. I remember these old women who rode the trolley in the Finnish winter. They were distinctly “curious” and touched by the forces of gravity. Both the women and the child have passed away. It took me many days of writing to bring them back with their many austerities.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 