“The memory hole
My memory is unusually short. Or rather selectively; I remember some things way back in time. Then you can imagine that it would involve unusual events, strong emotional outbursts or the like. But that is not the case at all. It can be completely everyday comments and situations that get stuck and play themselves out in the mind many years later when I find myself in a similar situation. Every time I cut onions, it echoes in my head: “Big pieces! Cut big pieces!” It was a woman I was in love with, instructing me how she wanted it. I have forgotten most of the year-long relationship, but that particular comment stuck out for some reason. Unfathomable are the windings of memory.
The same is true of most things in my life; my memory is like a point in time during my life, surrounded by a fog of oblivion and with a highly diffuse chronology. Sometimes the fog can dissipate a bit when I see an old picture or find some old text that I wrote, but sometimes I don’t even recognize that I took the picture or wrote the text – even if I signed the work. Even less do I manage to place things in their proper time, which brings to mind one of these points of impact in my life:
Sometime in the mid-eighties I did an interview with a doctor, Håkan Wester-something I remember his name. This Håkan had just received his doctorate with a thesis on time from a psychosomatic perspective. Time has always interested me, so I called him and we set up a meeting. A few days later, I got on a train to Halmstad, where we met over a long lunch and had a two-hour long conversation about the time. The details have faded away, but I remember how this Håkan was like a living encyclopedia when it came to stories about time, and he piled finds about time on top of each other as he quoted everything from the world of comics to famous philosophers and writers.
The children’s comic book Bamse, Håkan explained, is built on simple archetypes. Bamse is the clever friend; Lille Skutt is the anxious and easily startled rabbit; Grandma is like a kind God who lives on a mountain high up and looks out over the world with binoculars – not unlike the Asa god Odin with his ravens Hugin and Munin; and finally we have the turtle Skalman who stands for wisdom. In one episode, the rabbit Rekord-Ronny comes to visit from town and wants to compete against Lille Skutt to see who can run the fastest. They decide to run around Grandma’s mountain and Bamse, the righteous one, takes time. Rekord-Ronny wins and Lille Skutt becomes despondent and cries. Just then, Skalman comes by and hears about the race and how Rekord-Ronny won by one second. Skalman’s reflection then becomes: – Well. What is he going to do with that second?!
“The woman gives birth to a gannet over a grave. There will be light for a brief moment – then all will be dark again,” he recited dramatically.
Håkan’s research was about how different diseases can affect patients’ perception of time in different ways. He told, for example, how time “can stand still” for those who suffer from schizophrenia; If you ask a sixty-year-old patient how old they are, they answer with the age when they became ill. Other diseases could lead to a distorted perception of time.
Håkan also told about an indigenous people somewhere in the world who had an interesting relationship with time. They had only one word for past tense; for they did not exist yesterday, last week or a year ago. Everything was put into the same “warehouse of time”, where there was no chronology. So it was not possible to determine how long ago something happened, whether it was a month ago or a hundred years ago. When things had happened was unimportant to them, what was important were the experiences and what was learned from the event.
Presumably these people’s perception of time was much more nuanced than that, but the story stuck in my memory.
Much later, I met a disabled “user” at a residence whose memory worked like this; she could remember events but could not place them in time. For her, everything that happened was “yesterday” – a word for all past time.
I myself have a very selective memory. Looking back on my life, “point impact” is the best I can manage, but all the details are blurred.
It was a very interesting meeting for me who could never fit the times.
So when I manage to find some of my old texts.”
