Comprehensive Primal Memories

One of my favorite authors I’ve read over the past couple years has to be Thomas Wolfe. He was a big influence on the beat generation and was called the most talented writer of his generation by William Faulkner. His untimely death prevented his writing from reaching the global scope he planned for. The clarity of his ideas combines with the personal significance and truth of his stories and creates an incredible effect that makes him so worth reading. One of the best examples of his work is found in a story called The Web of Earth in which his Mom recalls her most significant memories for him. In this passage, she is telling him her earliest memory and we can see Wolfe’s mother had a positive and lasting impact on his development as a writer:

“’Come to the window and look out. Do you remember how we came?’

‘Remember! Now, boy, you ask me if I can remember! Lord, God! I reckon I remember things you never read about—the way it was, the things they never wrote about in books.

I reckon that they tried to put it down in books, all of the wars and battles, child, I guess they got that part of it all right, but Lord!—how could these fellers know the way it was when they weren’t born, when they weren’t there to see it: they made it seem so long ago and like it happened in some strange land—what could they know, child, of the way it was: the way the wind blew and the way the sun was shining, the smell of the smoke out in the yard, and Mother singin’, and the scalded feathers, and the way the river swelled that spring when it had rained? The way the men looked as they marched back along the river road that day, as they were comin’ from the war, and the things we said, and the sound of all the voices of the people who are dead, and the way the sunlight came and went, and how it made me sad to see it, and the way the women cried as we stood there in Bob Patton’s yard, and the men marched by us, and the dust rose, and we knew the war was over. Lord, God! Do I remember! Those are the things that I remember, child, and that’s the way things were.

I can remember all the way back to the time when I was two years old, and let me tell you, boy, there’s mighty little I’ve forgotten since.’” (The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe. pg. 79)

I want to start by praising this passage while arguing for its status as an exemplary example of how early memories work. We begin with a provocation: the mother finds everyone else’s understanding (of her son and of the expert writers) to be inadequate because they never saw any of it. But she did, boy did she ever! Six categories of memory types are given for earliest memories: Historical Events, Family Moments, Vivid Sensory Experiences, Troubling Events, and Childhood Antics (including playing). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-s-your-first-memory/. This passage has five of those types. It would have had all six had the narrator rushing out to hug the men but she was too young. Scientific American finds it easy today to split our memories into these categories but it would’ve been much harder to try on someone who had lived during the Civil War. We trust our scientists because they have reality that they can divide and quantify so we give them the authority based on our named inadequacy. But we have the same means and the same tools; we just lack information from the start. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to simplify experience and convince ourselves of being unique because our first memory fit a certain category. This is intuitive. It’s best to comprehend the wholeness of experience with help from distinctions necessary for scientific study. We divide our experience to study it, but feel things on intuition. The categories of this study in Scientific American could account nearly as much to first memory as to what people feel are significant experiences in life. . The problem is mirrored in Miss Wolfe’s Bowie-esque plea of “how could they know?” It’s odd to think about how important vivid sensory experiences are and yet how much we’re willing to live in ugly metropolitan areas. It’s also funny to think of the tiny slice “childhood antics” as growing throughout life. I think the smallest slices potentially become the largest over time, with family moments becoming standardized and vivid sensory experience being normalized on T.V.

What I identify most with in the passage above are the images of normal life that are slightly amiss. The voices of the dead, the sunlight coming and going, the unexpected sadness of seeing it marking the passing of time. As time passed and the men marched by eventually they knew it. As clear as day, war was over, there was only a certain amount of dust kicking left to do. What I personally remember about early experience is the surprise and the certainty, the chance and the understanding. Suspended in an experience above our heads switching between shock and surprise and the understanding that is overcoming us. For most of us, shifting back and forth from certainty to awe is a common movement in experience. Whether we’re listening to music, watching TV, reading the news, or worrying about our kids or our girlfriend we’re making these exhausting shifts again and again without ever speaking about it. Perhaps we’re all subconsciously trying to form a memory in a world where they’re becoming lost. When an idea evolves into a precise understanding or our own understanding is asserted and experienced as truth then we have a potential first memory.

The innocence of youth is that we hardly know the consequences of the actions of the world or ourselves. In innocence we have the unique perspective of having the world as our guide rather than the ordered, stoic recreating and recounting of reality of the human realm. By opening our minds we gain variety of experience that sticks with us forever. If our world were aimed at remembering you would see people sharing their ideas on social networks and people trying to give one another new understanding. When we lose our memory to more or less ancillary processes of immediate awareness and creativity we lose any perspective on what it might all mean. The product in our mind is no longer something that somehow fits into our fabric of reality but a specific goal set by specific human wants or “needs.” The innocence of knowing that your memory is with you forever: not one part has to be held tightly suspended within the rest.

Memory is forsaken insofar as we imagine ourselves to be building a better life for ourselves every day. Memory is self-indulgence insofar as it is incompatible with our daily lives. Memory is actually our most honest way of confronting the world in its entirety and our best chance at living a life that has a lasting impact. When we let memory sit on the sidelines we leave 99% percent of our understanding and ourselves at the door. If we take our memory back again as our mode of operation our emotions will again appear as the glue of experience, both collective and personal. Perhaps this was Freud’s point: libido held everything together unconsciously and developed beyond innate primal connection, but his agenda is just an extended restating of the problem of memory and emotion in an indestructible id. Libido or Id represents the concrete outcome of the transformative and lasting memory. This memory is left blank. If we understand memory and its problem-solving creativity we can give ourselves everything we might want of Freud without having to play his mind games. We can overtake the father of psychology only by considering our early memory as our basic and essential means of apprehending and thinking about reality.

So what’s the meaning or the point of all this? When we reflect on our past it’s possible to be amazed. If philosophy is an attempt to anaesthetize us to laugh in an abstract reflection it should be compared to memory building. The process of philosophy through history can also be linked to different types of memories in imaginatively profound experiences. This is ultimately what I hope to accomplish in the future. The sad truth about reality and experience is that we have picked its bones clean and yet tomorrow we have no idea what will happen. “Serious ideas” are just strange versions of human experience that happened to last. If you want to do serious and rewarding thinking I suggest considering something with many variables where you can test a hypothesis and see what comes out. Perhaps the rise of the detective story in today’s television programs reflect a need for something like this to get out in a world that is run by the many hands of we.