Listen to this post:
Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability.
This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.
The rules of the waking world do not apply in Memory. There we meet the dead and re-experience events no longer available to us in the waking world. The tick-tock time of the waking world has no hold in Memory. Decades can be traversed in an instant and, stranger still, subsequent events can alter earlier events.
Memory is built of stories. It has a strong relation to history—the story of the waking world—but the relation is less strong than the machine model assumes. Memory is liquid. Two experiencers of the same event, when they visit Memory, re-experience that event differently. This is often because of other events in each experiencer’s personal Otherworld. That is to say, events in Memory alter other events, of their own accord, against our protestations.
Memory is related to Dreaming. Both involve the waking world fading away. Both ignore tick-tock time. Memory has a stronger relation to history than Dreaming. Dreaming has a stronger relation to the imaginal than Memory. The Unconscious is related to both Memory and Dreaming, though more openly acknowledged in the latter.
Synchronicity is a link between the waking world and Memory. A being without Memory would never experience synchronicity. Synchonicity is when Memory breaches the waking world and imparts meaning to some event there.
Memory is a land we most often visit alone. Some parts of it we know extremely well; some parts we’ve never heard of. It is not, however, a personal land existing only within our own heads. Memory is both personal and shared. The shared places are how we understand our lives together. They are built from history and, in turn, shape history.
Memory is the land of the ancestors. As the elderly approach death, the ancestors call to them out of Memory. The dying spend more and more time there, in preparation. Sometimes the ability to transition between the waking world and Memory fails; this is what we call dementia.
Medical professionals tell me that the dying often see people who are not there. I say that death is the moment when the barrier between Memory and the waking world is unbearably thin. In that moment, spirits from the Otherworld of Memory cross over to bear the dying into their new existence.