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| | SELF-KNOWLEDGE
THROUGH WRITING YOUR MEMOIR
Eleanor Lincoln, CSJ
Women at the Well Ministry, St. Paul, Minnesota
© 2003
A retired professor of English from The College of St. Catherine,
Dr. Lincoln has given numerous workshops on memoir writing.
This online workshop is adapted for your personal use.
Part 2: The Gift of Memory and How it Functions
Before
beginning Part 2 ask God to expand and deepen your memory: “For you
desire truth in my innermost being, teach me wisdom in the depths of my
heart” (Psalm 51).
MEMORIES GIVE YOU IDENTITY AND CONNECT YOUR PRESENT WITH YOUR PAST
Imagine
how dreadful it might be to have amnesia—a loss of memory about who you
are and where you come from. The worst aspect of memory loss would be
loss of identity. (Almost every one has memory lapses almost daily.
These are normal)! But the more serious memory losses of deep dementia
and recovery of painfully hidden memories are matters for psychological
counseling; these conditions are not relevant to memoir writing for a
normal person.
Your memories let you know yourself, especially
the deeper memories of the past. (You may not remember what you had for
dinner last night, but you remember your first day of kindergarten!).
Long-term memories remain intact (unless there is severe memory loss
from illness or debilitation). Even people with ordinary senility often
have vivid memories of the distant past.
However, with the
busy-ness of life, some memories lie beneath the surface and need to be
discovered and stimulated. Even a computer has “memory” but needs input
to be called forth. Your memoir writing will help you to call forth
memories that are beneath the surface.
MEMORY, THE SENSES, AND IMAGINATION
Everything
you know has come in through your senses. Both your mind and your body
remember. Sense impressions (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) create
images, and it is these images which form your imagination.
No
one completely understands imagination but scientists agree that it
stores someplace in the mind an image of every person, place, thing,
event ever experienced. Every memory is based on the images in your
imagination which were created through sense impressions.
A
baby's first language is image. An image in the mind is whatever has
been perceived by one or more of the senses. The images in a baby's
mind might be:
a brightly colored ball (sight, also touch)
the running of water into the bath tub (sound, also touch)
a bar of soap (smell, also touch)
warm bath water (touch)
apple sauce (taste)
The
vocabulary of images build as baby experiences more through the senses.
Gradually baby learns to verbalize these sense experiences as she hears
words that represent a particular image (ball, water, soap).
Your
imagination both stores your memories, which come in the form of sense
impressions, and recalls them. Your imagination can also project future
experiences (based on earlier experiences).
Think about your
imagination as it relates to memory. By getting in touch with sense
experience you can often trigger whole series of memories. Your sense
of smell triggers memory most quickly.
Take time to imagine
these smells: lilacs, freshly-baked bread, cabbage, the floor wax used
in your grade school. Do any of these smells trigger a certain memory
for you?
***WRITE: Remember
an odor (pleasant or unpleasant) from the first early memory you wrote
about in Part One. List a few vivid words that will describe this odor.
Keep writing and see how the odor triggers more memories.
Throughout
our life this language of image is basic to our experience. Sense
experience forms memory, and as we have words for these images we can
evoke them in our imagination by the word.
***WRITE:
Close your eyes and enter the place where that early memory happened.
Then list all of the sights, sounds, smells, etc. you now experience as
you recall that memory. Stay in the memory as long as you continue to
be aware of the sense impressions which that memory created.
MEMORY AND LANGUAGE
Psychologists
and linguists say that people acquire skill for remembering significant
images and episodes only as they acquire the language skill for later
retrieval. Your first “language” consisted of images, but gradually you
learned to shape events into a story through words, through language.
As you learned the art of shaping images into words, you learned to
tell a story through language. And as you shaped the events into this
story, you also developed the means of retrieving later the memory of
these images-shaped-into-words.
You began to do this some time
around the age of three--but earlier if your language development
enabled you to put your experience into words sooner than that. In what
ways do you remember (or not remember) episodes from these early years?
Psychologists distinguish three fundamentally different kinds of memory:
1. generic memory—not of one episode but of a series of repeated episodes such as going to bed when you were a child;
2.
episodic memory—a specific event with a given time and place (e.g. the
birth of a younger sibling or when you broke your arm);
3.
autobiographical memory—specific memories that we weave together
because of some significance to us (one of the “stories” of your life).
Your
autobiographical memory began to take root as you began to have
conversations (with your self or others) about what happened on a given
occasion and how you felt about it.
By age three or four, you
probably reached a level of language ability where words became the
medium by which you represented the events of life to yourself (rather
than through images only). Through language you retrieved memories.
Psychologists say that this memory process begins with the images
unremembered by you as a baby but taking shape when you developed
language skills.
Then you began to value your memories and tell
stories about yourself to yourself and to others. Parents and other
adults modeled for you how to piece together a memory and articulate an
experience with a beginning/middle/end. When you reached the level of
language ability where words become the medium by which you represented
the events of life to yourself (rather than through images only), you
were able to retrieve memories whenever you wanted to.
You also
began to structure the events, highlighting the most salient points.
Before this stage when you were a toddler you probably could go on with
endless and undifferentiated detail, saying breathlessly, “this
happened, and then this happened, and then this happened....”
Experts
on autobiographical memory now believe that a person's life story is
revised as the years pass, with some memories highlighted and others
fading to support the current view of oneself.
Penelope Lively
in her memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda; A ChildhoodPerceived: A Memoir
reflects on her childhood in Egypt. She describes, as well as reflects,
on her moments of mere observation: “the young child's ability to focus
entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon here and now, without
the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation.”
“I am lying on
a sofa, knees hugged to my chest, staring at the sofa back, which is a
blurry chintz patterned with flowers, large blue and green pansies. I
have a pain in my stomach. I trace the petals of the pansies with my
finger. The pain comes in great waves, ebbing and flowing, washing
through me as though I were in the grip of some tide. Lucy is somewhere
in the room, knitting. I can hear the clack of needles. There is just
the blurred pansies, and the clicking noise, and the pain” ( p. 21).
WRITE*** List the images Lively describes and the senses which lie
behind them. Notice that the entire passage is made up of images.
Images remembered from earliest childhood can begin:
- to connect with one another,
- to demonstrate the relationships of these sensual memories to time (past and present),
- to have meaning,
- to become part of the story of our lives.
Penelope
Lively at the beginning of her preface to Oleander, Jacaranda tells the
reader that her memoir is “is also a discussion of the nature of
childhood perception...” She continues: “I believe that the experience
of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a
headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by
the wisdoms of maturity. But it has seemed to me that it might be
possible to take these pictures in the mind - those moments of seeing -
and, by turning them into language, to look both at the way in which a
child sees and how this matches up with what it was that was seen....”
(pp. vii-viii).
Oleander, Jacaranda demonstrates beautifully
that uncovering experiences through images is indeed possible.
Recollecting the images of your childhood and then re-membering them as
an adult are moments of wisdom. Writing your memoir will bring about
some truly spiritual moments.
WRITE***
Make a list of times/circumstances in your life that are particularly
memorable to you now. Choose the periods in your life that you want to
focus on particularly. Limit your remembering to a specific time such
as childhood, family, school (grade school, high school, or college),
work life, marriage, raising children, home and neighborhood,
retirement, etc.
Now that more memories are surfacing, ask God to open your mind and heart even more. Pray with the psalmist:
“O God, you have searched me and you know me,
you know when I sit and when I stand,
you discern my thoughts from afar”(Psalm 139, vv. 1-2).
When you are ready, turn to Part 3: The Wisdom of Memoir. |
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