What if we remember wrong... and destroy the lives of others?
by Stephan Joubert
When I sometimes hear or read how people retell stories about certain experiences in their lives or that of others, I get worried. I remember the case of the minister who almost lost his job years ago when someone made up stories saying he made immoral suggestions to her. When he was just about to resign, the other person admitted that she made the story up to hurt him. The questions that hunt me are: how do we remember? and: do we remember correctly?
Recently, I read an interesting article by the world-renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, entitled: Speak Memory (The New York Review of Books, 21 February 2013). It’s a fascinating read in which Sacks tells how he and many others, including well-known people like Ronald Reagan, George Harrison of the Beatles, Helen Keller, and another American president, Coleridge, experienced certain memory distortions. In the case of Sacks himself, he retold stories about bomb attacks during World War 2. He remembered these experiencing as if he was present personally, only to find out later that he wasn’t present when the bomb landed close to their home. But a letter in which his brother described the bomb attack with great detail touched Sacks so deeply as a child that it became his own story and his own experience. There was no doubt in his mind that he was also present during the attack until his brother explained to him that this was not the case.
With George Harrison plagiarism was in question. Harrison was found guilty of this when he wrote the song “My Sweet Lord” in 1970. It had direct similarities to the 1962 song “You’re so fine” of Ronald Mack. But in the case of Harrison, and earlier in that of Helen Keller, it was rather a condition that Sacks calls cryptomnesia. It’s the unconscious and non-intentional internalization or ‘making your own’ of other people’s material without evil intentions. Both Keller and Harrison experienced the material at their disposal so personally that it became part of their humanity. Even a lie detector test wouldn’t have proven them guilty, because there was no awareness with them that the material was someone else’s.
Sacks writes: “We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”
When I read this article, I realized afresh that I need to interact with my own memories a bit more carefully. I remember selectively. And subjectively. Sometimes I remember things that I might not even have experienced. That’s why I outlined a few principles for myself:
I do not recycle negative stories about others. If I do I keep those stories alive in my head. The Lord expects me to close such books.
I encourage others not to believe or share negative stories about others as is.
If I really doubt a story’s reliability, I try to clarify the facts at the source of origin. Otherwise I shut my mouth!