False Memory

I thought I'd already written this week's blog!  False memory  - only joking. 😉

My reading matter at the moment is 'Girl To City: a memoir ' by Amy Rigby. I've loved Amy's music since the mid-1990s, bought all her early records, have caught many of her gigs when she's played in the UK, even interviewed her one time (and my friend Richard Booth, ex-Plummet Airlines, took the photographs). 

In the early part of her memoir, Amy (then McMahon) writes about going up to art college in New York City (from native Pittsburgh) aged seventeen in the summer of 1976, and getting into the nascent NY punk scene (CBGB, Max's et cetera) via a boy she met and dated named Bob (Gurevics); then how in the summer of 1977: "Bob had passed an audition and was in a band, The Poppees." She goes on to recount how she and her second year roommate Lisa went along in the fall of 1977 to his inaugural gig with the group at Max's: "Bob wanted to do a good job but it was almost too much pressure. To step into a pre-existing band, to fill in for a departed member, must have been a lot tougher than coming up with your own music together with a group of friends... I don't think he enjoyed himself, but in my eyes he was a hero. He'd played Max's. He was in a band."

I didn't know much about her involvement with Bob until reading the memoir, but this much I do know about The Poppees - as you can verify from several online sources: Bob Waxman was a founding member (along with Paddy Lorenzo) in 1973. The pair shared a love of  '60s British music and as a quartet (with Arthur Alexander and Arthur Harris) they recorded their first single for Greg Sage's Bomp! label in 1975 after he'd heard a demo they made. Their profile and the gigs they got in NYC increased markedly in the wake of the record and they laid down a second single which showed them taking their love of the first British invasion (Beatles, Kinks, Who) and the second (Buzzcocks, Damned, Sex Pistols) and melding both into the basis of what became known as power-pop. They did play both CBGB and Max's, opening for the likes of Blondie, but they had disbanded by the end of 1976.

All of which goes to suggest that there may be a significant quotient of false memory in one or other or - heaven help us - both of those accounts.  For apart from anything else, I can find no evidence that there was ever any other Bob in The Poppees than Waxman (though all things are possible).

False memory is an intriguing phenomenon, the seemingly credible recollection of something that either never happened or happened significantly differently from the way it is remembered. 

It is well documented that for any single event, multiple people may retain different versions of what 'happened'. This is because our senses cannot capture every detail but take impressions of the experience and then our brains 'make sense' of what we've seen, heard et cetera. We will all notice slightly different aspects of the event and our brains will interpret the impressions and fill in the blanks based on our past experiences, prejudices and sensibilities. Only the camera and the microphone never lie.

It is also well known from psychological experiments that if the memory, witness statement or the like  is being recalled under interrogation, the content of the questions and the way they are posed (leading, loaded, suggestive in some degree) often bias and condition the details of the recall. Memories are mutable things.

Speak, Memory

So what about the recollection of an event that may never have happened at all? 

"Remember that time you fell in the pool with all your clothes on?" "No, I've never done that in my life. You're imagining it, or it was someone else." "It was you, I was there!" There are three possibilities. Either the person denying it has genuinely forgotten and has lost the memory entirely, or the person claiming it happened actually saw someone different fall in and is confused in the recollection, or it never did happen but for some reason (s)he imagines it as potently as if it had. (Actually, there is a fourth possibility, that it's a wind-up by either party, in jest or for some more sinister and destabilising purpose.)

In a week when more poor children and their teachers have been mown down by a gunman in an American school, I was reminded of an incident which I swear I happened to observe on a holiday to the USA twenty years ago, though my family still maintains I imagined it all. We were out walking downtown and I heard an altercation behind us. I turned and saw, a block down at the corner on the other side of the street, a man step backwards out of a shop doorway. He was followed out by another man pointing a handgun at him from a couple of feet away. Suddenly the first man fell violently backwards to the ground. There was a simultaneous dull retort. I sensed he had just been shot. It was broad daylight, and we were walking along a wire-mesh fence outside the car pound of a rental firm. I just urged my wife and daughters to keep on going. I'm not sure they realised why and I didn't say anything else at the time. Later on I told them and they were incredulous. They'd neither seen nor heard anything and thought I must have imagined the whole thing. I know I didn't.

Pierre Janet

Some of the earliest research into the mysterious workings of the mind and how we make memories (false or otherwise) was undertaken by the pioneering French physician and psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947). He was one of the first to explore and hypothesise about the relationship between past experience and how that shapes present perceptions and memory-making. He it was who coined the terms subconscious and dissociation, and he also formulated an early theory of transference. His work was ground-breaking and there were claims in the early decades of the 20th century that Sigmund Freud had plagiarised Janet when formulating and publishing his own widely-read and accepted treatises. No doubt that is not how Freud would have remembered it!

My latest poem isn't particularly on theme, but thoughts of what continues to unfold in eastern Europe have been pressing for fresh expression, lest we forget. 

Dissociation

What answer to the riddle of bullet holes 

in the family samovar? Or solution to the

tangled puzzle of muddied human limbs?

How to resolve this equation if X is ego

and Y is never allowed to be expressed?

What sense to be made of your enormous

pixilated image mouthing patriotic hate?

More fodder conscripted to serve a State

with no grain for bread and oh no circuses.

I don't remember victory like this before!

But what of Amy Rigby? you ask. And life after Bob? In a nutshell, this: she abandoned art for music, was in bands The Stare Kits, Last Roundup and The Shams, got married to Will Rigby (drummer with power-pop band the dBs), had a daughter, separated and went solo in 1993 as a singer-songwriter, recording a series of hugely enjoyable albums. On a musical tour of England she met punk-rock musician Wreckless Eric (Goulden) and the two have been an item ever since. I'll leave you with a musical bonus, a backward-looking reflection from 'Middlescence ', Amy's second album. Click on the song title to activate the YouTube link: The Summer Of My Wasted Youth

Thanks as ever for reading, S ;-)

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Memory Spins False Worlds

Our fame is as storytelling creatures. Arguably, this is the dividing line between animal and humankind. Our ability to displace ourselves from the present moment even though we inexorably occupy it, and to dwell instead in the folds of the past or fret upon the unfolding of the future – this is what makes us human. It is our birthmark; an almost-irremovable spot that can be the cause of distress or celebration, depending on how we choose to wear it.

You’ve likely noticed it by now. When you pass by people in the street. How some walk with their heads bowed, eyes to the ground, brows tortured by thought, aware of your being only at the minimum level of attention necessary. They are not really where their bodies are situated at all. Their physical surroundings periphery to their actual point of concentration. Auto-pilot episodes, elsewhere minds, bodies locked in cruise control.

Wanderers on some material plane, apparently loose parts in an external, objective world that, for all our understanding, goes on changing largely independent of our inner states. And yet we consistently superimpose our inner states upon this objective, external world.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps we are souls under house-arrest, peering through the looking glass. All too often, our vision is fogged or otherwise restricted. There are only so many angles of perception we can hold at any one time. No matter how we might crane and stretch to attain a better view, we will always have our blind spots.

And there are parasites in our houses too.

Consorts of endlessly transmuting energies and disembodied voices. You cannot outrun them, for you are locked inside this house with them. And to rage against them is also no use. With either strategy, you only succeed in inflating your enemies, helping their shadows loom larger on the wall.

Where we attempt to exterminate one family of thought, we succeed only in ensuring the multiplication of its offspring. It is the myth of Heracles fighting the Hydra. In decapitating one head, several more are sure to sprout in its place. The only proper solution is to face the head of each snake directly and to properly cauterise the wound. But this, it’s a conversation for another time.

If you’re an ordinary human being, the chances are that you’ve been living under this sort-of house arrest like the rest of us. Worse still, you’ve been living there so long, you might have no understanding of your identity beyond the walls which contain you. At its most extreme, this means you cannot separate yourself from where you reside, you might mistake who you are for the very house itself and everything contained within it. This means the disembodied voices - the ghosts haunting its many rooms - are also haunting you.

These unresolved voices of the past become the chorus that fabricate our stories and repeat them back to us. And we become little more than hosts possessed by this echo-chamber, navigating our limited space and time according to the framework set upon us by our store of past experiences. We become aware of our blind reactions only in the playing-out of their consequences, and realise all too late the wisdom in the saying: what you own ends up owning you.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

This, of course, a slice from Orwell’s 1984: a warning about the dangerous mutability of information. It’s an admission from the novel’s totalitarian Big Brother government, otherwise known as the Party, which recognises that in order to exert control over its population they must continually weave a story to which all past evidence corroborates. All evidence of which exists only in records and human memory. The Party must therefore be in full control of all records – doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary – and also be in full control of the minds of its people – also doctoring or outright eradicating them when necessary.

Implicit in this process is an appreciation that past events have no objective existence. The past is dead and lives on only in the mind. All that truly exists is the present. The Party understands this. Whoever recalls the past has the ability to alter its shape, which – as the majority of people behave according to their past – grants whomever manipulates past events the power to manipulate behaviour in the present. And behaviour in the present creates a predictable pattern for behaviour in the future. Put otherwise, you act in your present according to your past: your present actions build your future. Be cautious therefore, which version of the past you choose to live with.

However, there is an escape hatch here, if you will, a get-out-of-jail-free card. I could tell you, that you, like the Party, are also the governing body with the power to manipulate past events, thereby determining your behaviour in the immediate now. But this seems to be an unnecessary exhaust of energy. Wouldn’t it be better instead to live entirely unburdened by the past?

Read again the statement closely.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Now, reverse-engineer the equation.

For the past to determine the future, the present must be the direct consequence of the past. Without such a present, the past can have no bearing on the future. It seems to me then, that the present moment is everything, the fulcrum on which a life experience is continuously determined. There is an acknowledgement in this equation: absolute power belongs to whomever dominates the present moment.

And guess what? This anonymous ‘whomever’, that person, is you.

The erudite truth is that you are always occupying the present moment. Though your elsewhere mind might convince you otherwise, you cannot remove yourself from the unceasing now, no matter how hard you try. Whether you realise it or not, your relationship with the present moment is the most significant determinant of your life experience. You can be the victim of circumstance or the manufacturer of circumstance. That choice, ultimately, is yours.

A slight modification of the Party’s statement seems unavoidable for my purposes here. Forgive me, Orwell: I’m aware I’m taking you out of context. But let us say that whilst ‘Who controls the present controls the past’ is indeed true, we can also elaborate, and choose to say: ‘who surrenders to the present is uncontrolled by the past.’

Memories spin false worlds. Unburden yourself. Remove the shackles of the past – loosen them at the least – and your future will become increasingly unconditioned; an infinite sea of potentiality.

Thanks for reading, Josh.

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False Memory - The Way It Should Have Been

One of my nephews had a birthday last weekend. He is my sister’s eldest and was the first baby to be welcomed into the immediate family since she herself was born and the anticipated event had filled us with excitement for months. I found myself remembering his birth, which was thirty-six years ago and with pangs of sadness, discovered my false memory.

A Wednesday afternoon and I was at work. All was quiet, just three of us on the premises. The shop was shut, retail staff still observing half day closing. It didn’t affect office staff so we were busily working – actually, the work would have been completed already and we were probably taking it easy and having a laugh until we could lock up and leave. When my sister phoned to say things were happening, baby on the move, help wanted, my colleagues sent me on my way.

I drove to her house, a short distance from where I was on Dickson Road to where she was near Stanley Park. My false memory tells me that I packed her into my dark blue Austin Maxi, but I didn’t have that car anymore. I had a light blue metallic and rust Datsun Violet. I was sent on a quick errand on foot to a nearby shop for camera film – those were the days – and returning to my car, thought my sister was about to give birth there and then as for some reason, the passenger seat was flat. Luckily, I delivered her to the hospital before any other delivery happened and waited with her until her husband arrived from his place of work out of town. I went home.

This is where my recollection of events all goes funny, such a strong memory yet so false. By now it is early evening. I’m sat on the settee in the lounge, knitting a chunky-knit cardigan with thick needles. I’m doing a sleeve which is growing quickly and I’m thinking if I finish this piece before the baby comes, it’s a girl, if not, it’s a boy. I don’t think we had gender reveals at that time. My dad is sitting in his usual armchair, reading every word in the Gazette, sharing a few adverts in the classified section, items for sale, usually cars, and drawing a ring round them with his Parker biro. He’s wearing a denim-blue sweater that I made for him. He checks his yellow tea-cup, disappointed to find it empty. The phone rings in the hall and he goes to answer it. Of course, it was the happy news of the safe arrival of a perfect baby boy.

This is how I remember it. Or is it how I wish to remember it?

 My father had been ecstatic to learn he was going to be a grandfather and shared his news with anyone who would listen. A boy would be lovely after raising daughters, but of course a granddaughter would be loved and cherished just the same. Arthritis plagued my father. He blamed it on rolling barrels and lifting cases of bottles in the pubs. He relied on pain relief and some days he was better than others. Out of the blue, he suffered a heart attack. It was serious, but he rallied and after a couple of weeks in hospital, he was well enough to be discharged. The experience had scared him and he would need time to recover. He felt mentally shot and physically weak and told me how he hoped he would be strong enough to hold the baby when it arrived.

He didn’t get the chance. Another heart attack took his life nearly two months before my nephew was born. He was 62.

False Memory

Blue knitted jumper, nice
Subtly fragrant Old Spice.
Another pot of tea?
Empty cup.
I was sure he was there
In his usual chair
With an open Gazette
Close to hand.
On the table, his pen,
Should he need it again,
Circling classified ads,
Things for sale.
I thought he got the phone
But he’d already gone.
My mind playing cruel tricks.
Death’s torment.

PMW 2022

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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