“»Isn’t it beautiful?« gasped Milo. »Oh, I don’t know,« answered a strange voice. »It’s all in the way you look at things.«” (Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth. New York 1989.)

If the strange voice is correct and the things we look at transform themselves to what we see in them, what does it mean for the thing itself? Can something beautiful remain beautiful for someone and become horrible for someone else without changing its core, just depending on how it is being seen. From which perspective we see it. If we look back at all the memories that we collected on the road, will they change, depending on our current way of looking back? Are we creating them ourselves when we try to relive what was? What and how we remember things depends on who we are right in the moment of remembering and we suddenly realize that a memory can’t be locked and preserved, like carvings on a cave wall. Memory is different from factual past events, it extends the possibility of simply revisiting exactly what was. Memory is beauty and pain, complexity and moving, and it is never complete.

What is a memory?

“The reconstructive view of memory holds that the memory for the same event is different each time it is recalled.” (Braun-Latour, Kathryn A./Zaltman, Gerald: Memory Change: An Intimate Measure of Persuasion. In: Journal of Advertising Research. 46/1. New York 2006, p. 57.) How does the reconstructive quality of remembering impact our identity? Are we still truthful to ourselves if we reconstruct what we believe happened, or what we think we remember, or do we lose ourselves in confusion, feelings and longing for a different past than the one we left behind?

Identity and consciousness 

John Locke argued that identity is not tied to the unchanging body but to consciousness and the ongoing experience of being the same person: “[T]heir identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else.” (Locke, John: Of Identity and Diversity. Chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd Ed.)

Memory is one part of this process, but it is not meant to be perfect. In the same way as memory is not a rigid, unmovable picture of truth, so is consciousness: “Looked at from the inside, consciousness seems continually to change, yet at each moment it is all of piece—what I have called »the remembered present«—reflecting the fact that all my past experience is engaged in forming my integrated awareness of this single moment.” (Edelman, Gerald: Wider Than the Sky. The phenomenal gift of consciousness. New Haven/London 2004, p. 8) Forgetting, changing, everything remains in a flow state, memory and consciousness and this fact allows grief, transformation and growth.

Remembering to forget

Every time we remember something, we compare our own image of one’s self with who we were and what we did before. We’re comparing versions of ourselves: “[T]he present constructs the past and shows that autobiographical memory may be used dialogically to contrast with, and thereby scaffold, current self-constructions, to disavow intolerable aspects of self, and to preserve disused but valued self-representations.” (Josselson, Ruthellen: The Present of the Past: Dialogues With Memory Over Time. In: Journal of Personality. 77/3. New Jersey 2009, p. 665) A true autobiographical and historically absolute accurate reproduction of the past will not be possible. The real truth finds itself in between factual reproduction of the past and the subjective and personal construction of our memories. But would the absolute truth be actually desirable?

The nature of the flow

We cannot decide how accurate our memories should look like and at the same time, we cannot tame our own nature of wanting to fixate on things that cannot be held captive. We take photos, we film, we write diaries and try to desperately remember all the wrinkles on the face of our loved ones when we are gone. Maybe living with a more moving definition of what memory is, means accepting that “we lose some and we win some” which might not be the most satisfying way to deal with memories, but the most human way of doing so perhaps. When losing absolute historical accuracy, we also gain meaning and - almost ironically - identity. We know who we are in relation to what we remember. Realness and accuracy are not the same thing, nor do they have to be. And that is why the vagueness of memory is not a flaw. It is fundamentally and utterly human. It allows cultures to grow, individuals to heal, and communities to imagine their potential futures. It allows new narratives to be written. It makes space for nuance and beauty and contradiction.

A part of that floating river of memories, but the inherent urge to keep and “frame” memories at the same time constitute a human life. 

Who would we be without the indentations in our memories?