Teetering - Oct 28 2021

 

Teetering

Oct 28 2021

If we are nothing without a past.

If we are constructed of memory.

If we're all high-rise spires

sheathed in glass

   —  steel girders

stacked one above the other

all the way up  —

then what happens when we forget?

Like a Jenga tower,

will we also collapse

when a single piece is pulled?

Does it leave us uncentred,

stranded

in the interminable present,

re-inventing ourselves

from second to second

with no sense of who we are,

untethered and ungrounded?

Yet they say memory is flawed.

Because our brains are not cameras,

and each time we recall

we edit the past.

Through the glow of nostalgia

the conflation of acts,

self-serving forgetting

and questionable facts.

Through fickle moods, the latest news

and the people who surround us,

not to mention those we miss.

Flimsy as a house of cards

we airily teeter

and not for long.

Rebuilding ourselves, again and again,

but never quite the same

and with an incomplete deck.

So, does anyone know

who you really are?

And how sure can you be

of yourself?

I write often about how unreliable memory is. Current neuroscience has validated this: the finding that memory is not fixed, but instead is a fluid thing that is in some way refreshed and then retained every time it's retrieved. But if memory is crucial to our sense of ourselves, and losing one's memory is a kind of death, then are we now less ourselves?

Which is maybe a more complicated existential question that it needs to be, since by definition we aren't anything but our present self. But still, have we lost something? Have we constructed a delusional or self-serving or even self-sabotaging persona? If memory is not photographic but rather impressionistic, can we count on anything?

I think the inspiration for this particular poem at this particular time was a podcast I heard (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/dvhmg9b/39-stephen) about a 30-something man who has lived his whole life with this sense of separation and illegitimacy – he has never felt he could be his true self, yet finds it a lifelong struggle to fit in and be like his family -- until he discovers he was fathered by someone else, and that with his newly discovered biological family suddenly feels accepted and validated. So aside from a newfound sense of belonging, knowing his past has given him a sense of continuity and completion: discovering his true backstory made him feel fulfilled and, for the first time, able to be “himself”.

Which is a good example of how we need a fixed and continuous past to be fully ourselves in the present. And raises the question the poem addresses. What if the past isn't reliable? What if memory isn't certain . . .or keeps changing . . .or is actually lost?