I Wrote It All Down Somewhere

....which is good, because it is likely I wouldn't have remembered much of it, otherwise. Memory, exports say, has to do with "that something that almost didn't happen." Which is why all our Christmases blend together into one big red and green blog except for the year that Great-Grandpa died face down in the soup. Or the year all Mama and my presents fell behind the tall hutch because we were both standing on chairs, poking around to catch a present or two as they tumbled down into our arms, on Christmas Eve. They tumbled down, of course, just the wrong way, and the men in the family had to move the hutch and drag them out, one by one. "Jesus Christ", said my mother, "I didn't think opening a few little presents would create such a big goddamn stir."

In the Greaves family, it did.

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It seems that the emotion attached to each of our memories is chemically encoded in our brain's amgdala. And each memory is changed - - chemically altered - each time we retrieve it. Retrieving a memory "means it will be 'reconsolidated', or slightered altered, by a chemical process that helps store it anew after being updated. So each time we recall something, we adjust its very chemistry and each time we bring it up our consciousness, the memory comes us as we las modified it. This and other fascinating facts about memory is from Daniel Goleman's 2006book SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE. If you order the book - - but only if you experience "fear" while ordering the book, your memory will be encoded with fear, and fear is one of the emotions that invest a memory with power. Go ahead. Try it. Order the book while your mate stands nearby dressed in a dinosaur and holding a gun. You can have fun with this memory, gradually altering its neurons, for years. No bullets, please, but your mate does not have to tell you that till later.

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"Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid."
Ugo Betti
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Me, I just write down as much as I can.A journal in my purse, another in the bathroom. Another under my bed. That way, I can write down the most commonplace things, that is, things that happened over and over, and never worry that they are gone forever, Clementine.

From January 25, 1965:

" Six-forty-five p.m. Tom is nearly home from work. I always try to be sitting in the livingroom when he show us from work because it embarrasses me to be standing in the kitchen. I have looked both ways. No Banditos out there to kill him, today. Maybe tomorrow!"


Now I remember something that almost didn't happen. The Banditos had just begun their begin of terror in Tacoma. We lived next to them in a line of cabins on Lake Steilicom (sp). Three days earlier Tom and a few Banditos and I went to a topless show in downtown Tacoma. The show was nothing. What was something was that Tom, drunk and in a show of sympathy, laid his hand on the chief Bandito's knee as the head guy tearfully spoke about his years in VietNam. Whereupon the head guy jumped up, threatened to kill Tom right there and then, and then chased us out of the place, saying that, if he happened to see Tom coming or going to work in the morning or evening or any time in between, he would murder him then and there, on the spot. We believed him. I got up extra early and snuck Tom out the door. Tom came home an hour late each night. I remember. Because, see, all of this almost didn't happen.

One other Bandito memory, this time from my 1965 journal: "I asked the head Bandito guy for pot. I think I need to relax. This morning he came to the door holding a sack. "'Here,' he said. 'Oh good,' I thought, 'the marijuana.' 'Eat this,' he said, 'it's better for you than pot.' He thrust the bag into my hands. 'Okay," I said, "thanks." I trusted him. Inside the bag was a huge HERSHEYS bar and two packages of Twinkies. Shit. SOme big tough guy. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
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These entries, these memories, amuse me. "The past," Emily Dickinson remarked, "is not a package one can lay away."

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"Everybody needs has memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
- Saul Bellow

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We speak with several voices, out of several selves. Psychotherapy allows people to naturally enter - and experience - the power of poetic speech. Because I seek the personal, caring modes of psychotherapy as ooppoosed to the "scientic helper" modes, I could easly make poems out of patient talk. It's raw, crude poetry, and not one of my patients would claim it for its infectious spontaneity, but like Ray Bradbury said, "Oh, it's limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way." The passionate, the dramatic, the mysterious,- - so many individual elements lend themselves to that moment of truth called poetry.
Here is a"found poem" taken directly from one of this week's patient notes:

"Last night I dreamed
I lived a time called Dogtime.
A giant emerging eye asked,
Have you received your dignity?
Stabs of memory
Always come for me
That way, at night.
Today I believe myself.
Open windows.
Bathroom doors.
Grandma and Grandpa.
Every night one of them
Comes to kill me.
I am tired of running away.
Come home, come home.
Yo are the lonely blossom.
If I stand half in your light,
Half out, you invite the silence
That follows silence."
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Why have I recorded so much of everything that has occurred or been spoken in my life? Delight, dismay,passion, love, joy, curiosity, fascination, fear of loss. My case is not unique. I am afraid of dying, puritanism, obedience, authority, and, shameful and mundane of all, boredom.