I didn’t really have any particular topics that have caught my fancy this last week, other than researching and writing my essay, but I did come across an idea after reading this week’s entry on the “Much Ado” blog. You should check it out; it’s good. This project has gotten pretty hard, and I’ve run into a snag such as the ones described in Minot’s chapter on “Ethical Questions: How Much is Real?” When writing our personal academic essay, do we “adopt a policy of unqualified adherence to the facts,” or do we allow ourselves some “flexibility” (43)? Apart from the ethical issues, there’s always the matter of how we remember certain events, even if they didn’t necessarily occur like that. Our memory is a powerful mental tool, but like an old microwave, is sometimes faulty and will burn our oatmeal. Like the character Leonard in the film Memento, we often remember what we want to remember, and how we want to remember, and cut out the more unsavory parts. Next thing we know, we’re in a shady motel room and we’re covered in cryptic tattoos. Sometimes, we focus only on those unsavory parts, and can’t remember the good. The problem with honesty, and self-honesty, when writing these essays is having to sift through so much mental debris to tell our story.
But then again, how important is this? If we are telling a story about our own lives, we never remember something exactly as it was because we see it through the prism of time and experience, even if it was last week. We’re never the same person twice, only a bundle of experiences and memories written, and re-written, about those experiences, like our own personal (auto)biographer sitting with a typewriter in our brain, who never seems to write down the good and important stuff while it’s happening, and only later gets around to piecing together a narrative. He’s not the best at his job, but he’s all we’ve got.
Long story short, how can I be honest with myself and the reader if I can’t exactly remember how everything went down? I can’t. I can only capture the sense I got from the experience, how it made me feel, and what the biographer wrote.
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4 comments:
Ahhh...that is totally true. Our brains are so unreliable, it's scary sometimes. I can come up with the most inane piece of trivia and can't remember huge chunks of my childhood.
I love autobiographies and history, so it's a scary prospect to be reading Ben Franklin's as a gospel only to remember what you've reminded us of...the faulty nature of telling our stories. Maybe it was easier back then when they weren't so overstimulated by multimedia. They probably told their stories orally more than we do, so by the time they got to writing them down, they were closer to the truth than maybe ours would be. In any case, I know for myself I've become so reliant on pictures, computers, email, internet, journals, etc. to remind me of things and provide instant answers to things (seriously, I will wake up at 3 a.m. and google the theme song to Family Ties if it occurs to me and I can't immediately remember it) that I've become a complacent rememberer.
Blog Sounds and Much Ado,
I would say remembering is like one of the qualities of essaying or assaing--an attempt to remember. "Snake Pit" in Chapter 9seems like a good example of how others can remind us that it's just an attempt, and we'll inevitably get some of it wrong just like others who attempt to remember the event we're describing. I suppose the ethical dimension is how truthful we are in our attempt to remember.
I have the problem of a faulty memory many times...I had trouble writing my first essay for this class because of that--I was writing about my first experience reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but I couldn't remember the intricate details about what related assignments we did or if we discussed it much in class...I wrote down what I could about it, but I felt that if I had a better memory, I could have done so much more with it.
Think about anything you read. The tone of the author will come through. I think that's similar to the perspective with which you remember something. If you remember something as the worst day of your life, it would come across with your tone. If your parents described the same day, it might be a little more light-hearted or detached because they may have remembered that same event in a different perspective.
As an author, the event should come across as you want it to or as you remember it. Hope my "perspective" helps!
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