Paper Stays Put

When Memory Is Wrong

à bien y réfléchir, Antoine Monmarché (Monch). Used with permission.

The Old Diaries

I recently unearthed two of my mother’s diaries, one from 1976 and one from 1981. She is gone now, and the diaries are what remain of her daily attention: who came, who left, what was said, where I was.

Between them, they recorded two events that stopped me in my tracks.

She was precise by nature, a detailed person who wrote things down because she meant them to stay put. I have little reason to doubt her. But I’ll note that a diary is not a camera. It is my mother’s record, shaped by what she noticed and what she chose to set down. I’m trusting it, but I’m aware that it’s a choice I am making.

The Motorcycle and the Man

In the 1976 diary she mentions, twice, a motorcycle ride I took with a fellow named “Valdo.” Two things are unusual: the name and the motorcycle. You would think I’d remember a name like that, and if not the name, then the ride. Unless memory fails me (and it very well could; more on that later), I had ridden on the back of a motorcycle perhaps once or twice before the mid-1970s.

Zipping through the Veneto countryside on a motorcycle with an Italian man named Valdo would have been memorable.

And yet I have no memory of the event or the man.

Reading about it didn’t produce even a flicker of “oh yes, now I remember something about that day.” Nothing, zip, a black hole, a lacuna, a word I’ve written about before, with some dread.

Which raises the question: what else don’t I recall?

The second event is the reverse. Here my mother’s record has no gap; the gap is in mine, filled with something that never happened.

The Boy Who Died in the Well

In June 1981, a six-year-old boy named Alfredo Rampi, Alfredino, fell into a deep, narrow well at Vermicino, outside Rome. The attempts to save him lasted three days, and he died in the well.

In Italy, at least, it was the first time a tragedy became a live national spectacle.

RAI’s main channels joined together for some eighteen hours of almost continuous live coverage, watched by more than twenty million people. I remember the rescuers, the commentary that never stopped, and the helicopter shots of cars lining the roads to the town as people drove out to watch.

And I remember, vividly, being riveted to the television with my mother. I remember the room, the green sofas, the screen.

We Were Never in the TV Room

The 1981 diary tells a different story.

My mother records the news from Vermicino, and then goes on to record things about me happening in another city. She was in Treviso; I was living in Pordenone. That is perfectly correct. We could not have watched it together.

And yet I remember being with her.

Here is the part that unsettles me most: the room is real.

It was the TV room in Treviso, with the large green sofas, where my mother and I really did sit together in front of the news. We watched the Friuli earthquake there in 1976. We watched the 1979 Mississauga train derailment there, which was the first time I ever heard the word “Mississauga,” spoken by an Italian newsreader.

My mind didn’t invent a scene. It took a real room, a real mother, a real habit of watching disaster together, and set a new disaster down in the middle of them. The memory isn’t false so much as assembled.

I should also admit that the same memory has given me those helicopter shots and the details of the broadcast. I’m reporting them as I remember them, and I’ve just shown you how much that’s worth.

What the Experts Say

How does one explain the lost memory and the false one? The people who study memory have some answers.

For Valdo, there are two ordinary explanations. Either the memory was laid down, and I can no longer reach it, or it was never laid down at all. Memory researchers call the second an encoding failure. If my attention was elsewhere, or the ride didn’t seem to matter at the time, nothing much was stored. What looks remarkable from decades away, a strange name and a motorcycle, may not have seemed worth noticing at eighteen.

The first explanation has an odd champion. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar kept a diary of his own life for six years, recording some 2,400 events, and then tested himself against it. With enough cues he recalled a great deal, and the events he remembered best were the ones that had stood out or stirred him at the time. Some seemed to be gone entirely. As the study is often retold, when people who had been present supplied details he hadn’t written down, fragments of some of those events came back.

Lost, it seems, may not always mean erased. I have my mother’s two entries and no other references. Valdo, wherever he is, may be the only person who could open that door.

The Alfredino memory is a different failure, and a well-mapped one. Psychologists call it a source-monitoring error. The content is remembered correctly, but it is attached to the wrong source, place, or company. The broadcast was real. The room was real. My mother on the green sofa was real. They simply came from different evenings, and my mind put them together. It had a pattern ready: in that room, disasters were something we watched together.

The Flashbulb Memory

It also matters what kind of memory this was. A shocking public event, a vivid sense of where I was: researchers call these flashbulb memories, and they have been testing them for decades.

The day after the space shuttle Challenger broke apart in 1986, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch asked students to write down how they had heard the news. When they asked the same students again about two and a half years later, many of the accounts had changed, some completely, and the students’ confidence had nothing to do with their accuracy. Some, shown their original answers in their own handwriting, still trusted the version in their heads.

A later study of memories of 9/11 found the same pattern: those memories faded at about the same rate as memories of ordinary days. What didn’t fade was how vivid they felt, and how sure people were of them.

That is exactly my experience: the room, the sofas, my mother’s presence, and complete confidence in all of it. Who was with you is one of the details these memories most often get wrong.

Think: A photocopy of a photocopy

There is one more uncomfortable finding, though it comes with a caveat. Experiments that began with rats suggest that each time a memory is recalled, it may become briefly changeable before it is stored again. If something like that happens in us, then every time I thought about Vermicino over the years, I wasn’t playing back the original. I was saving the merged version again, and each time it felt more like something I had seen.

Who Cares?

In my writing I often ask: does this matter? Sometimes I answer that question, sometimes I leave it floating.

If I were an eyewitness to a crime or something momentous, of course all this would matter. Clarence Darrow, the famous American lawyer, is often quoted as saying:

There is nothing as unreliable as an eyewitness.

No one seems able to say where or when he said it, which, in an essay like this one, seems fitting.

At the time I might have read that, felt smug, and thought: other people, other eyewitnesses. Now that smug comfort is gone, and good riddance. In June 1981 I was a witness of a kind, one of more than twenty million people in front of a screen. If the research holds, many of us now remember where we were and who was beside us vividly, confidently… and wrongly.

What Else is Wrong?

And it matters closer to home than any courtroom. I nearly built a memory of my mother around an evening that never happened. What else do I remember about her that her diaries would quietly correct?

That one I’ll leave floating.

Others more famous and more erudite than I have put it better, so I’ll set their words down here before I forget them:

Voltaire, writing in 1770:

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Richard Feynman:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

And the Vulcan officer Tuvok, in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager about a memory no one could verify, put it more drily:

Human memory is rarely perfect.

A Vulcan would know.

Into the Weeds of Etymology

Etymology sometimes holds answers to deep questions too, so I went looking. I came away believing that “memory” descends from a Proto-Indo-European root, (s)mer-, meaning “to get a share of something.” It seemed to explain everything: memory as an apportioning, each event getting its share, some getting none.

It’s wrong — or rather, I was wrong.

There are two roots spelled (s)mer-, sitting side by side in the dictionary. The first means “to remember,” and gives us memory, memorial, memoir and mourn. The second, unrelated, means “to get a share of something,” and gives us merit, emeritus, and polymer. I had read one entry and taken the meaning from its neighbour, fusing two separate things because they sat next to each other.

I did with the dictionary exactly what I did with the green sofas.

The true root may have the better story anyway. Its relatives include an Old English word meaning to remember sorrowfully, and a Greek word for that which causes anxiety. And in Norse myth there is Mímir, whose name may share the root, the giant who guards the Well of Wisdom.

Since we’re exploring etymology, there’s the other half of the question: forgetting.

The English word is plain and Germanic. Old English forgietan joins for-, which here works against what follows, with gietan, “to grasp,” the ancestor of our get. To forget is to un-get, to lose your hold on something in the mind. Oddly, the physical sense, letting go of something in your hand, isn’t recorded in any Germanic language. The word seems to have been about the mind from the start.

I like this because it is precise in an uncomfortable way.

You can only lose your grip on what you once held.

Forgetting means I once had Valdo and the motorcycle ride, and then let them go. But the word allows another possibility it doesn’t name. Perhaps I never took hold of them at all. Perhaps the afternoon passed over me without catching, and my mother, holding her pen, was the only one who grasped it. If so, I haven’t forgotten anything. There is simply nothing in me to remember, and the only copy is on her page.

And I would have had to hold on. You don’t ride pillion without gripping something: the seat, the frame, the waist of a man named Valdo.

My hands grasped that day, and my mind did not.

The grasping root is a large family. From the same Indo-European source, a root meaning “to seize,” come comprehend, apprehend, prey and prison. Taking hold of something can be understanding, or capture.

The Romance languages forget differently. My mother wrote her diaries in French, and the French forget, oublier, comes from the Latin line that also gives us oblivion.

I’ve gone down this way before. In Lake Lacuna I wrote about the oubliette, the dungeon reached only through a narrow hole in the floor, where people were put to be forgotten, and about my fear of being lowered into one, with every door in my mind gone dark. I wrote then that I write before everything slides under. I didn’t know my mother had been doing the same thing all along, and that her pages would hold what mine didn’t.

A narrow shaft, open only at the top. A child at the bottom, and the whole country gathered at the mouth, watching.

Oblivion — an oubliette — a well.

References

Memory research

Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 3–28. doi
Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature, 406, 722–726. doi
Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and Accuracy in Recall. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge
Talarico, J. M., & Rubin, D. C. (2003). Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories. Psychological Science, 14(5), 455–461. doi
Wagenaar, W. A. (1986). My memory: A study of autobiographical memory over six years. Cognitive Psychology, 18(2), 225–252. To verify: the "people who had been present" detail and the page range.

Vermicino and Italian television

Dipartimento della Protezione Civile, account of Vermicino, 10–13 June 1981. PDF
Sky TG24, "La storia di Alfredino Rampi." tg24.sky.it

Etymology

Online Etymology Dictionary: (s)mer-, memory, memorious (for Mímir), forget (also *ghend- and oubliette).

Quotations

Voltaire, letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 28 November 1770: "Le doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule." wist.info
Richard Feynman, BBC Horizon, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981).
Clarence Darrow, attributed. No primary source located.
Star Trek: Voyager, "Retrospect," season 4, aired 25 February 1998. IMDb quotes

Denise Choppin, "Lake Lacuna," Louche Leaves, 5 May 2024. https://loucheleaves.com/what-was-that-word/