October 2018

In last week’s Saturday Essay from the Wall Street Journal, I read that “memory and imagination are closely related, and the temporal lobe plays a vital role in each.”

I had heard this sentiment before and recall feeling it in my own life. I have a memory of myself as a little girl staring out at a glacier in British Columbia, hands up, mimicking mismatched skii’s on the wall behind me. My dad’s next to me, doing the same thing. I’m 3 years old.

But where did this memory come from? I don’t remember anything else of the trip, nor much else of my 3 year old life. But there is a photo of this moment, hanging in my dad’s room, both of us smiling like doofs. Is my memory accurate? Do I actually remember this moment or have I backwards-reconstructed it from years of seeing this photo and imagining what it was like?

It’s possible that the answer is the latter. According to the National Institute of Health, “findings from basic psychological research and neuroscience studies indicate that memory is a reconstructive process that is susceptible to distortion. In the courtroom, even minor memory distortions can have severe consequences that are in part driven by common misunderstandings about memory, e.g. expecting memory to be more veridical than it may actually be.”

Distortions in memory therefore have a broad range of implications: from one of my first “memories”, to courtroom witnesses, to the narratives we tell ourselves as our life story. When you think about music, it’s temporally divided into past, present and future. A love song can be one about heartbreak (past), an exciting night out (present) or a crush (future).

dijon’s song Nico’s Red Truck, track 8 from this month’s Jamm, is a nostalgic guitar-driven, R&B-ish piece all about how humans remember and forget things as time rolls on.

The song starts off hazy, with a crooning dijon reminiscing on his last days spent in Maryland. The guitar is soft and patters like the “pouring rain” dijon opens the song with lyrically. Around the 2:32 mark, dijon finds a photograph:

I found a photograph, all faded and bunched / I had a camo hat, leaning on a red truck / On Nico’s red truck

dijon finds this photograph ^ out of the blue. It’s not a picture that’s been hanging on his dad’s wall for years, and so he reacts out of surprise, calling it “strange.”

I had a wide angle smile in these pictures that you took / It’s strange, I forget that’s how I looked / It’s strange how much can change in just a short time / It’s strange I’m getting older, I’m afraid

He’d forgotten how he looked. But what did he remember?

I rode my bike to the YMCA / Got my first pay-check from working the day-care / It got wet, ’cause it rained on the way back / But I loved the smell, so I just inhaled / I stopped in a field for a minute when night fell

Do you remember my Civic? / Dark green, dark green / With tan seats, tan seats and no A/C / It was sweet to me

His first paycheck, wet from a rainy bike ride. His old dark green Civic. His memory is spotty, highlighting certain things and graying out others. Do we choose what we remember? What if we forget it all? dijon sings, scared:

I’m afraid I might forget / What if the good memories start to fade out?

Days get grayed out / What if I can’t fix my head / What if I can’t fix my head now / I don’t wanna forget us

Sometimes, I go home and an old friend tells me a story I don’t remember at all. A story I’m in, a good story filled with laughter. 16 year old me might have remembered it. But 22 year old me let it fade out, somehow, along the way it got grayed out. And yet, there’s 3 year old me standing in British Columbia in the back of my head. Why? Why does dijon remember his dark green Civic but need a photograph of his friend’s red truck to remember it?

Is life best spent retrospectively thinking about the past or living in it now? What is a life, if not just a collection of memories? And if it is, perhaps it’s just as imperfect as we are.

Until science catches up with our brains, one thing is certain: time moves on and Lord knows, I can’t keep up.

I can’t keep up, the years move by so quickly / I can’t keep up, I can’t keep up

– theMonthlyJamm | October 15th, 2018