Memory Lapse
Yes, Ambassador Gordon Sondland forgot he had said this and that, that he had done this and that and that he had called President Trump from a Kiev restaurant and then admitted to embassy staffers that Trump cared only about his own political goals in Ukraine. Yes, Trump doesn’t seem to remember what he said about this or that or in whatever formal response to the Special Counsel he may or may not have made. Yes, Lindsey Graham does not remember what he said about the imperative of impeachment when Bill Clinton was under fire now that it’s his golfing buddy from the White House under fire. Hell, he doesn’t even remember how awful he said Donald Trump was before Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 and the hearts and minds of over 80% of all Republican voters. Even Jim Jordan, a man of only fifty-five years of age, can’t remember from the Benghazi hearings to the Trump impeachment hearings how the treatment of important government documents and emails should or shouldn’t be handled in terms of public transparency. OK, that’s just politics, right? We all know its less about a memory lapse than about adjusting to the realities of political life and criminal exposure.
Now I see that the Financial Times is reporting about an uproar in the European worker communities (EVEN in a well-funded pension country like the Netherlands) about employer and government push to renege on pension funding commitments as the post-financial crisis gap between investment returns and low interest rates has caused pensions to forget about the promises they made years ago to their participants. I seem to remember that the inevitability of all that and more pain on the global pension front was amply predicted in my 2013 book on the Global Pension Crisis and in ten years of lecturing at Cornell University in my pension class. I now officially predict that in the can-kicking world of pension management, the barricades in the generational war to end all intra-species wars will only get higher and higher as the next twenty years clip along. Billionaires will eventually wish they had built more rocket ships like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic to carry them and theirs away from this global conflagration against which you simply cannot build your walls high enough. That wealth tax from what’s-her-name Warren will seem like chump change if there is anyone around to remember it then. In this case it is less a lapse of memory and more about economics and a failure to see problems fix themselves as the world writ large was wishing and hoping.
I am now officially old according to medical science, having passed the sixty-five-year-old mark. Old translates into many afflictions, but first among them is memory lapse. This one is the real deal. For me, that takes the form of spacing-out over names of movie stars and other people I am trying to recall. It’s very annoying to no longer have the mental fluidity to recall things from that pocket of grey matter when I want to retrieve it, but it’s also hardly tragic. The information is all mostly still there as best I can tell since it floats to the surface in its own sweet time and gives me an even greater old-guy image by causing me to have more “Aha” moments than one should in a conversation…or shortly thereafter. One of the reasons I write is that it is a form of mental calisthenics that I am certain helps maintain my mental flexibility. But it seems like I’m working my upper body in the gym while my legs go limp through neglect. I wonder if there is something I can do to exercise the name-reclaiming part of my brain? I’m sure there is, but while writing seems a productive mental wood-chopping exercise, I’m not sure some tongue-teaser name game would appeal to me too much, so I tend not to do it.
I look around me in my home office here in Lower Manhattan. I have four shelves of nothing but memorabilia. If I went into the living room, I would see an etagere with another four shelves of more artistic and valuable memorabilia. The dining room table is a self-designed curio table where countless pieces of antiquities, which are memorabilia of my younger days of archeological diggings in Central America and on the Tiber River banks of Rome, sit in black sand for dramatic visual effect. Every wall of our apartment is covered in artwork which all has some special memorable meaning to us either in its visual symbolism or in its origins and creation. That is all in addition to the memorabilia I keep in my nearby office, both on the desk and bookcase as well as on the walls. My home in Ithaca is nothing but one big memorabilia repository and I even have a carriage house room that is dedicated to be a place to gather and display work and life memorabilia. If you look in the drawers of that desk and credenza set-up you will find copies of work and school output from me that serves no purpose other than to jog my memory of good and productive times past. How I will integrate and undoubtedly triage all this stuff kept in multiple venues into a cocoon to surround myself in my memories as my actual cellular memory gets less and less able to unearth its own choice tidbits on demand is way beyond my foresight.
Memory is a very funny thing. Certain things in life are shielded from us by virtue of a lack of our synapses’ ability to transmit things like pain. That’s a very good thing if you think about it. And then there’s everybody’s favorite memory drug from jellyfish, Prevagen, which is advertised liberally all over the TV. Unfortunately, the FTC is suing the makers of Prevagen on the basis that it is a bullshit drug for which there is no actual scientific evidence that it does anything to help defeat memory loss. Memories gather over time like a proverbial snowball rolling downhill and when we are young and mentally nimble. Maybe we are nimble because there are very few memories (relatively speaking) to clog up our brain pathways. As we get older and memories build, we certainly have more on the snowball to sort through. I have no idea how the mechanics of the brain work in scientific terms, but I suspect that some people are better at shedding trivial memories and keeping those which are most important. I have no idea what any one of us would define as important or trivial, but I’ll bet a trait of personality is that it sets those standards for us. Then that filter (fine gauge or not) does its job. If we are bad at this triage, I suspect we are people who live with lots of regrets. That seems somewhat consistent. If, like me, you claim to be regret-free (I think that is more a choice than an actual ability), I think you are free to filter away with a fine screen.
So, why am I prone to forgetting names? I suspect that some people also attach importance to things one sees or ponders that other people are oblivious to. You know the difference between observant people and those who look past things you focus on. People care differently and more passionately about one thing versus another. I don’t think twice about spectator sports. Others can remember every detail about every game. But I love movies so why do I forget actor names?
The best I can do is presume that there are areas of the brain that are weaker than others and names are simply less relevant than themes. For the time being I will take that excuse and run with it. I will also keep on writing in hopes that I can continue to store more and more memories without tossing out old ones, and have the facility to randomly access those memories when I want since storytelling depends on it and without storytelling I’m not sure my memories are worth a good God damn.