Senses: Your Strongest Links to the Past
Surprise! Surprise!
Senses are your backstop, against which you can always brace your story and come up with the details that make it arresting as well as memorable. Doctors who charge piles of money to listen to people tell their personal stories while laying on couches rely on sensory detail and imagery to "make sense" or point understanding in a certain direction. And often answers or solutions jump out of our story as we tell it. Why is this so surprising to us?
What we remember is where we have been. How we remember is who we are. The details of how we remember represent our feelings—fears, hopes, joys, the laughter and tears of everyone’s life. Think of Jim’s dinner table dilemma. If we learn to permit it, our history creates our choice of words and governs what details get revealed to a great extent.
Unlocking the vivid recollection of a joyous or painful event can take many "keys," many details about what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, touched or felt. Your senses catalog impressions that when assembled in a story may provide the unique combination to unlock the true nature of an event or episode. You’ll be surprised how sensory information can untangle emotions you felt at the time--or dramatize them better than trying to explain them..
Your Story—Live!
Many writers began their craft in attempts to make sense out of their lives and its events. One of the most popular books among adolescents for decades was J. D. Salinger’s "The Catcher in the Rye," the "personal story" told by sensitive, troubled, Holden Caulfield in a faltering, quirky voice bright with irony. The truant Holden captured the hearts of millions of teenagers. This was a fictional personal narrative but, like all good story-telling, its sense-laden vignettes pulsed with real-life candor and authenticity.
Making your own personal story come alive may be very satisfying, even rewarding. Or it might provoke painful or angry feelings over unhappy, unresolved circumstances we tend to push away. Again, what comes up is merely "the information"—a neutral series of past events, details or feelings. Do not be too quick to judge them or put labels on them. And do not be afraid to share them when appropriate: others can often better see what remains hidden to us, especially since they are not emotionally involved as we are. As Marlon Brando says in The Godfather—"Don’t take it personally; it’s business."
Making your story come alive will be an edifying experience (and easier to record) if you let yourself follow where the information leads. Simply writing down these memories puts them in a unique perspective, something like putting specimens on microscope slides. The more you look into its episodes and events, your feelings and thoughts, the more you’ll realize your life had value and meaning you hadn’t been moved to recognize before.
"Stand in the Moment" Postscript: Brain Science
I've advocated recapturing memories by using your senses as you "stand in the moment" because it worked for me. I started doing it intuitively years ago and had already written this guide when I read of recent scientific confirmation that the reason this actually works involves how the brain stores memory. Brain scientist Antonio R. Damasio, in a Scientific American article entitled "Remembering When," declares: "[Memories] are distributed in neural networks located in parts of the cerebral cortex (including the temporal lobe) related to the material being recorded: areas dedicated to visual impressions, sounds, tactile information and so forth." In other words, the brain stores memories according to its sensory content in separate pigeon-holes. And he adds, "These networks must be activated to both lay down and recall a memory..."
Going back to recover memory is partly, like losing our childhood armor, an act of divestiture: shedding adult baggage we pile around our memories. To see clearly, we need to regress, preferably with the "eyes" of who we were at that time. If we’ve heard stories, seen pictures, re-imagined a memory, it’ll be harder to go back and attempt to literally put ourselves in that moment as we were when it occurred. But that’s the objective; that’s where real truth lies.
Things We Couldn't Know
Looking back involves understanding the difference between what a kid 1) saw or imagined, 2) saw but did not understand, 3) saw but misunderstood. As adults, we tend to "fill in" absent meaning and add it to the memory, though as children we couldn’t begin to decode certain things.
For example, during WW II at when I was five, I watched horrified as my usually genteel mother and father screamed and struggled with each other, one swinging a raw chicken, the other a butcher knife. This frightening brouhaha took place in our kitchen, with my parents wrestling each other for some awful advantage I could not fathom. My mother, flinty, quick and bird-like, stood under five feet, my husky father close to six. ‘Round they went, straining and grunting in a macabre dance, chicken and knife aloft. My fear and shock prevented me from even crossing the threshold from hall to kitchen to "protect" my mother. I can still feel that frustration.
What I found out later: My always thrifty mother had gone to O’Connell’s Poultry and bought an uneviscerated rather than an eviscerated chicken because it was a few pennies cheaper. This economy so enraged (and likely threatened) my poor father that he was in a fury to throw this chicken into the yard before my mother even got her butcher knife into it. And she, true to her Scotch ancestry, defended her precious chicken. A beautiful and usually impeccably groomed lady, my mother also made laundry soap during WW II on an old stove in our basement, stringy-haired and sweating as she stirred a steaming pot. The rank smell of this patriotic economy upstairs would make my father roll his eyes and wrinkle his nose in distaste.
Such memories bring up another caveat: when we talk about "how it really was" or "what really happened," the word "really" is truly relative. We can only approximate the truth from a remove of years; looking back from a different perspective so much later certainly can change the picture. In recollection, we operate with an "uncertainty principle" such as physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated in observing that the very forces needed to measure the velocity and position of an electron alter what is being measured. In memoir, too, mere focus can alter the nature of past events or feelings. Little is cast in stone.
Remembering is partly archeology, carefully uncovering pieces of our past that could be artifacts—changed by time, stories, wishful "editing" or even a need to forget. I remember how as kids we spied on Carmelite nuns, climbing a high cloister wall to peek over at the women inside. I connect that to behavior I saw among women without their men during WW II. I can "decode" the connection now but I certainly hadn’t a clue at age seven.
Letting Go
Finally, part of our purpose here is to let go, to revisit as fully as possible key moments in our lives and then to let them drift away from our minds because we have them fixed on paper. There is only so much room for holding on. But hold on we do, because we are not so much victims as captives of our past. What has happened cannot be undone, only—by remote, by recollection--better understood or appreciated. And so we come full circle: in the end, all is gone, except in memory--the only immortality we can prove today.