When first my consciousness surfaced this morning from the night-long swim through sleep, I directed my attention to remembering a photograph of a woman who has been traveling much too long, someone I love, whose photograph I have looked at often, and with serious consideration during the writing of these essays.
While these sentiments may be important to her and myself, they are also important to my subject. I have been motivated to regard this image, to find charming details, new discoveries, to memorize it. I know this photograph. I have searched it almost microscopically for meaning. I also know other photographs, for there are many photographs that I admire as art, that I have examined carefully. This one is not art, only a snapshot. Before opening my eyes I readied myself to observe the experience of remembering this photograph. It happens fast. First there is no photo, then as I become aware that I intend to remember it, it is there in memory. But what has “appeared”, and where is it? What kind of representation am I examining so earnestly? Can I actually see it “in my minds eye”?
It seems that the image recalled is less a mental copy of the original than an isomorphic abstract map of it with the inner image perceived as a field of feelings, as if I recall only my reactions to having previously seen the real photograph. This is not apparent in the beginning of the memory session. At first I am sure that I can actually reproduce the image in my visual imagination. However, a few tests - questions I ask myself reveal that I cannot describe the shapes, colors or textures from the original in enough detail to draw a reproduction. I am apparently not a projector and my mind contains no slides. However convincing the initial experience may be that I am “seeing”, what I am doing is feeling in some sort of pattern memory, and those patterns are stored as meaningfulness.
When I compare this effort with the effort of remembering less emotion - laden images, for instance the famous Lewis Hine photograph in black and white of a sweating mechanic in overalls who is tightening a huge bolt on a boiler rim with an even more gigantic wrench,* or the way my short street with all it’s houses looks, I am again convinced that I see internally. When examined, this impression also fades to the realization that only general impressions remain, mapping the organization of those images in ways that suggest that I have them laid out for scanning as graphic representations somewhere in my head. However, brain seems to be saying - “It seems that I can’t find the pictures anywhere up there, will a description do?”
That is what I am offered, and most of the time I am uncritical enough not to mind or notice the substitution. Perhaps I am normally grateful for the shorthand. Presented only with a few geometric abstractions about the image searched for, and a richly detailed map of meaningfulness, I can get right to work satisfying the reasons for the initial request. I want contact with my friend. I want to remember what my street is like - is like . It is a meaningful analogue I need, a likeness, not point for point accuracy.
If I could recall the digital image I would have to respond to it as if it were an original. This likeness saves some steps. But most important, it represents the difference between the subjective products of memory and imagination, and the objective phenomena in a perceived reality. Internal images are predigested, transformed in to familiar meaning-maps. Reality is always new.
But, in another twist, we do not always perceive reality newly. An old hat is an old hat. We superimpose these meaning-maps over our incoming experience, perhaps to prevent having so many ‘new’ experiences, to reduce redundancy.
As an artist, I try not to let these mental phenomena interfere with one another. I make an effort to see or experience some particular old familiar objects as new each time; to ignore the screen of previous meaning, and see afresh each new experience and event.
There are individuals who are burdened by the opposite kind of memory. They cannot forget details. Perhaps they suffer from a failure of the part of the brain (the ‘heart’-part?) that assigns meaning and encodes their impressions, compressed, in the language of reaction and emotion.
* When I next examined this Lewis Hine photograph, one I have seen nearly every day for the past year, and many times earlier, I discovered that not only did I not have a mind image of the original, but that what details I thought I remembered, were wrong. The boiler was much smaller than I recalled, so was the bolt and wrench, and the mechanic was facing the opposite way in the frame. Well—so much for my memory, and probably for all but a few eidetic memories, and—be wary of court witnesses. All the memory-nuts I had stored in my nut-brain were emotional interpretations. any map was out of scale, flipped, and useless for anything than identification of the emotional meaning, the reason why the image was remembered in the first place. The ‘map’ was there only as a tour-guide for search and recall purposes