Memory and Intent

A recent instance of déjà vu: I step out of the shower and into my cold livingroom. The ashen Northwest winter light comes in through dusty windows.

There is something in the tone and the granulation of the paint in my apartment. I am momentarily transported to someplace I think I remember, a house somewhere back in the neighborhood I grew up in. I can almost hear a Chicago Cubs game playing on a chipped, sea-green radio, almost feel my bare feet sinking into worn, scratchy carpeting, almost smell instant mashed potatoes and gravy and the stale coffee left over from that morning.

Déjà vu doesn't transport me to the places I've loved, or to any place that I've traveled. It takes me to early childhood, to quiet towns in the American grain belt. In my conscious memory I remember hiking on the Italian coast and summer evenings drinking beer on patios. In my unconscious memory, all I can see are switchyards and blacktop roads cutting through cornfields.

The one exception is musical memory. When I have a specific memory of a piece of music, it has nothing to do with a momentous event. It doesn't send me to anywhere important. In the age of the MP3, recorded music is what we use to fill in our lives, and it occupies our commutes, our long, lonely drives, the hours we spent cleaning our houses. When we find a piece of music evocative of a certain moment, we think of light, of color, of wind coming through an open window.

When we listen to a song and remember our associations with it, we are not remembering the actual associations. Every time we listen to that song, we overlay a new set of experiences onto the memories we want to hold on to, and we become more and more distant from our own memories. That memory-picture becomes blurred, filled in with white noise. It's when you can't remember the name of a song, when you think you'll never hear it again, that your memory will remain pure.

The nerves connecting the eardrum and the brain can send signals in both directions. Consequently, remembered music can be heard by the ear, as clearly as if it was coming from a speaker. The songs of my life nag me in bed late at night, and I feel as if I can hear the world spinning.

So many of the things we remember are very discrete and practical-- we need to remember what to buy at the grocery store, or the name of a co-worker's child. Maybe we remember some commonly held fact like the name of the Vice President of the United States.

What interests me far more is the memory that is unintentional, the moments when you are suddenly struck by something long-forgotten, when memories collide, when memories supersede your current reality. Déjà vu ends. I am standing in my livingroom, unmistakably here and now. A bit of sun shines on a far hill, and I can hear the cat meowing outside my window.