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At a glance, this post admittedly seems eclectic, which is writer’s code for incoherent. Two things… (i) okay, that’s fair; (ii) ‘show, don’t tell’ is writer’s code for respecting the audience, which is coded code for ‘intentionally eclectic’.
If this works out, future posts will probably be a whole lot easier.
Elsewhere, briefly, I consider something Martha Nussbaum offers about emotions – their essence, their “history,” as she puts it – which really I take to be our histories, and history too, I suppose.
To characterise grief, for example, she says, “… the experience itself involves a storm of memories and concrete perceptions,” what she earlier calls “rich and dense perceptions” (p. 65). Later, she indicates “memory” as synonymous with “an emotional habit” (p. 114) and cites neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux to say memories are not individual items per se but composite outcomes of our physiological network – in one sense, like how a movie isn’t just ‘by’ the Director but thanks to the enduring efforts of an entire cast and crew; in another sense, like how a highway is not so much a destination as a well-trodden connection between two destinations.
For his part, LeDoux distinguishes between (what I will call) instincts and emotions – the former we share with the lowest bacterium, the latter all our own, being self-aware, to boast on high as we will.
All this is fascinating. But when I experience flashes of memory, that seem to me disjointed things, which come and go, glimmer and fade, tripped by who-knows-what… when this happens to me, rather than look back at what comprises them, just as often I’m trying to piece them together with sharper moments into some more indicative pattern. I guess you could say I’m trying to find some meaning to them.
So… three memories, falling together…
In the backseat of my Mom’s VW, stopped for a fill-up, when gas stations belonged in neighbourhoods…
The jockey’s a young guy, teens or twenties, although that’s still just an adult to me. And he is hustling – from the driver’s window to the pump, the squeegee, the tires, back around to check the oil. I crane my neck, too obedient to undo my seatbelt, so all I see is an elbow and a ball cap. Into the building, back with the Chargex. Somewhere in all this, while he’s blurring past the front windshield, my Mom remarks to me, to herself, something like “Would you look at him – if the whole country worked that hard, the economy wouldn’t be in so much trouble.”
At the time, I took her word for it – this is before friends, or books, or stuff like favourite bands and watching movies. I just logged the admiration, and only much later was I struck that my Mom would ever note the economy. But I figure that’s how pervasive inflation really was at the time. For me, inflation was California on the evening news, people atop car hoods and lounging in open passenger doors, lined up waiting for gas.
VW Image Credits: Photos by Joel Stocksdale on AutoBlog
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In the front “yard” of the Firehall, where we played soccer and football, and watched the trucks come and go – today with one of the neighbourhood kids.
Just me and him, and no football – just talking. He’s one of these kids who’s already matured, a real brain, and speaks with that cadence adults have. Of all things, we’re talking about gold, which somewhere along the way I’ve heard my brother talking about with my Dad. And you know what they say… by the time you’re hearing nine-year olds talk about it at the Firehall, it’s definitely reached its peak.
In fact, he informs me with assured cadence, gold is now well past its peak on the way down, a claim my Dad confirms for me later that evening. And in one conversation for decades is lost all the lustre that no amount of history will sustain when you don’t know any of it anyway.
In the living room – the second one, where the furniture feels out of place and the jaded nuclear family finally muddles to a close.
I listen from the door as my Dad, in his deliberate way, explains fractional reserve banking and fiat currencies to me from the easy chair – derisively, at my incredulity, and ruefully, now that he, and we, are irrevocably scarred by misfortune. He explains the Commodity Exchange, in all its cacophony, and the primacy of foreign exchange, and he explains bank reserves, and the vacuous basis of all: debt.
And he forecasts the end – how it can only end, how it must end – and offers his strictest piece of advice: never owe what you can’t afford because – and really now I’m paraphrasing, this was like 1985 – because what people commonly call a House of Cards is actually a Set of Dominos, that are already well underway.
They’re faded memories, 35–40–45 years ago now, and an admitted jumble… is their only common thread “me” and nothing more?
You might say so – and hey, belonging to me, how could they mean anything to you beyond the scope of your physiological network? Different cast + different crew = different movie. So why even share them like this?
No, I wouldn’t expect my memories to strike you, at least not the way they strike me. Still, though… high road or low road – I just can’t help but wonder whether we’re all bound for the same destination.
Click here to read Memories Go Fourth
The Rhetorical WHY 
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