We Are Built to Forget

We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.

*

The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table.

Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.

I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.

*

People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are often unable to forget the causative trauma. What if we could simply erase that moment, expunge it as if it never happened? Researchers are working to develop drugs that will mimic the cannabinoids produced in the brain, pharmaceuticals that will find their way to those waiting receptors and lock in—click—a perfect fit. Release from memory. Oblivion. Bliss.

Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?

*

There are not many stories to tell:

My parents divorced when I was ten.

My father, unsurprisingly, was absent before and after.

Unsurprisingly, I loved him.

I got pregnant when I was sixteen. It was 1965.

I was expelled from school.

My mother kicked me out.

My father and his new wife took me in.

My baby was given away.

Later, I argued with my father’s wife.

She kicked me out, a permanent exile from my silent father.

I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen. Now I am sixty-five. All of this was a long time ago.

There. I have named everything you need to know. I have told these stories in other places, for other reasons, and am reluctant to say them again. I was on a basketball team. I am simply looking for that lost fragment.

I still can smell the peach. My grandmother’s voice, silent for thirty years. What was she saying to me? Did she say, Don’t be afraid? Did she say, Hush, everyone who loves you is sleeping? Did she say, Remember these hands cutting this ripe peach for you. This moment is important. (...)

*

We need to forget. Imagine remembering every fractional moment of every morning, as you showered, fed your children or made your coffee, pulled the door closed and turned the key. Like bad narrative writing, every moment would be equally important, the golden juice dripping through fingers as significant as walking out of my high school in shame one cold winter day. What meaning could we make if every second asked for our full attention?

We must forget in order to make room for remembering. We now have a metaphor for this process: delete. Here is oblivion. But here, too, is our hunger to know the full story. Our forgetting is the saboteur of that hope. I was on a basketball team with friends and classmates for three years. If we practiced or played games for one hundred twenty minutes five days of the week, for ten weeks of the season, where are those eighteen thousand minutes?

Maybe we are lucky if we produce a lot of cannabinoids. Wash the brain with forgetting. But what happens if we delete what lies near the center of our story? I remember, one day, running to the girls’ room to throw up again after lunch in the cafeteria. I remember moving past the school nurse, hunching over my five-month belly. Somehow later I was at her desk, and somehow I had in my hand a green expulsion card. I have it still, so I know this is memory, not fiction. I remember taking my mittens and jacket from my locker, walking down the long quiet hall, linoleum and echo, and past the big window in the office. The secretaries stared at me. I don’t remember any of their names. I remember the long walk home, and I remember terror. I remember a giving in, an understanding that this, finally, here, was the beginning of something too big and too sad. (...)

*

Artists Doug Goodwin and Rebecca Baron wanted to see—to really see—what is lost when analog film is translated to digital form. A moment-to-moment translation of an average 35 mm film would require four hundred DVDs. What happens when all that information is reduced to a single DVD? A lot of information is left out.

Goodwin and Baron studied motion in their “Lossless” series, manipulating the compression of information and exposing the residual effects of that process. Lots of frames had to go. Most had to go. How do we see an uninterrupted flow of movement, then, if most of the image is missing? Using John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Goodwin and Baron translated the analog film to digital form and then retrieved what was lost in the process. The result is a strange, beautiful run of smeared and melting images of men and horses tearing across a desert. We can make out the men, the horses, the churning legs and upraised cowboy arms brandishing guns. But the images fracture, hesitate, jolt, and smear again. What are we seeing? Memory. Most of the original images are allowed to be forgotten. That leaves a lot of emptied frames, blanks waiting to be written. Then, Goodwin says, “these frames look backward and forward in time to paint the resolved image … We toss out the keyframes and let the file try to connect the intermediate frames.”

What I see is whole sections of story tossed out, forgotten, and the ghosts of the forgotten, lingering. What was lost becomes visible, and it is beautiful.

by Meredith Hall, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)