Imagined Identities
On memory, self and stories.
Words by Kelly Poynter @kpoynts
So, is it really ‘true’? The story you tell about your life, the collection of experiences that brought you to this point – how you came to be you?
Have you told it so many times – to yourself, to others – that you no longer need to think about its twists and turns, the route from ‘a’ to ‘b’ so entrenched that you follow it blindly, a marble in a pinball machine hurtling to the finish line?
How far do you really trust the veracity of your memories, and what they tell you about yourself?
The matter of memory
“There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in highly subjective ways, which are different in every individual to begin with and differently reinterpreted or re-experienced whenever they are recollected … Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves – the stories we continually recategorise and refine.”
(Oliver Sacks, 2013)
We tend to think of a memory as something static. A moment, preserved. A jar of summer fruit, stored on a shelf, ready to be pulled down, held up to the light, examined and returned in precisely the same condition.
Memories are often presented as facts (consider the importance placed on eyewitness accounts in courts of law) and we construct our personal stories using memory as the scaffold, without stopping to question what material it is really made of.
The process of remembering was termed ‘imaginative reconstruction’ by the cognitive psychologist Frederick Bartlett to illustrate the fact that (as neurologist Oliver Sacks also highlights above) memory doesn't faithfully play back our experiences. Instead, it ‘reconstructs’ them imaginatively. And that act of reconstruction
has consequences.
As psychologist Daniel Schacter puts it: “Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge that we acquired after the event.”
The same point, with a little more steel (from a favourite passage in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road): “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”
Our memories mutate. They are an inherently unreliable record of our past, made of porous material, absorbent of both internal and external influence. In fact, research has shown false memories can be planted into otherwise healthy people through suggestion and memory-retrieval techniques, with one study resulting in 70 per cent of (innocent) subjects believing they had committed theft or assault.
I experienced my own minor version of the mutable nature of memory, after writing a story set in a place called Bowen Island. Bowen (situated just off the Vancouver mainland) is a place my friends and I spent a weekend while I was living in Canada, a long time/a different life ago. Nothing dramatic happened that weekend, but the image of the island stayed with me.
The stretch of the arbutus trees against the bleak winter sky.
The gravel road giving way to dense bush.
The night sky stippled with a row of lights from across the bay.
The damp smell of moss and rotting leaves underfoot.
As the writing project grew, so too did Bowen. The island became pliable, made from the same soft matter as memory itself, able to be moulded in service of my story without being constrained by fact. What strikes me now when I draw on my memories of Bowen is that not only have many of them mutated, they are also entangled with images from my creative work – there is no delineation in my mind between ‘truth’
and ‘fiction’.
The bear on hind legs, breath misting in front of her in
the damp air of the early morning.
Rows of sun-bleached headstones at the gravesite atop
the island.
A half-built log cabin nestled at the foot of the forest.
Of course, none of these things existed during my weekend trip all those years ago, but I lived all of these images in the construction of the manuscript. The fact that I can recognise, on an intellectual level, the cognitive process at play here doesn’t actually change how I now remember that island. The memory has swelled – it is an expanded version of itself. And as silly as it may sound, this new memory of the island, in its reconstructed form, feels more ‘real’ than any other version.
The duality of memory and self
That there is a relationship between memory and self is something we inherently understand (and pointing it out is close to cliché). What feels infinitely more interesting is what we can discover about ourselves when we start to question the fluid, constructive character of both our memories and our identities. To hold up a lens to their shifting, nebulous nature, their capacity to both transform and be transformed by
each other.
Memory’s primary concern is for substance over surface – only what matters most to us (at the time) is retained. We remember the gun, not the gunman, the story, not the sentence. But what matters most to us may not be what matters most to the person next to us, which means every memory is a representation of our own values and emotional landscape at the time of encoding.
I once had a conversation with a family member about an event that I hold as a defining point in my life and thus in the story I tell about myself, to myself. Their memory, as a bystander, included none of the menace or dark fury that mine did. The event, on their retelling, was almost innocuous. I recall feeling betrayed by the wide chasm between our memories, but even now, I can’t tell you whether the betrayal is theirs, or mine (both things are probably true).
What’s clear is that ideas of selfhood wield just as much power over the shape of our memories as our past does over our sense of self – it’s a deeply reciprocal relationship. Not only do we colour our memories each time we reconstruct them based on our current concept of self, it’s also been shown that we recollect memories that align with this sense of self.
This process has been coined the ‘congruence effect’; memories congruent to our present mood are more likely to be retrieved than ‘mood incongruent information’. In other words, we remember things that made us feel then the way we are currently feeling now – a continuous loop determined both by our current mood and what kind of person we hold ourselves to be.
This operates in a similar way to confirmation bias – we always find the evidence we’re looking for. Think you’re a universally loved joker? The memories you recollect will (most likely) confirm this self categorisation. Think you’re a bumbling screwup? Same scenario.
However, a rupture in that sense of self can lead to long-buried memories being released. Perhaps you (the ‘screwup’) are confronted with irrefutable evidence that forces you to reframe that perspective. Because you now view yourself differently, memories that had previously contradicted your world (and self) view are now able to be accessed. Pockets of air, rising to the surface.
Imagined identities
It was Joan Didion who said, “I’ve already lost touch with a couple of people who I used to be.” There’s a (very Didion-esque) air of melancholy to that, but we know precisely what she means.
Across this life, we inhabit (and discard, and lose touch with) multiple versions of our ‘self’. We stretch, we grow, we shed skin after skin after skin. And there’s endless beauty, and a little terror, in that.
The beauty (terror) for me is this:
If we understand that our identity is built from a collected mosaic of past experiences, accessed via memory, and we accept that memories are ‘imaginative reconstructions’ of past events, then we can follow that acceptance to its inevitable conclusion.
That our identities are also ‘imaginative reconstructions’. That identity itself is a mutable space.
That self, like memory, is a fluid, not a solid, which means it can be shaped it as we see fit.