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The Narrative Complexity of Our Past : In Praise of Memory's Sins

William L. Randall Theory Psychology 2010 20: 147 DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345635 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tap.sagepub.com/content/20/2/147

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The Narrative Complexity of Our Past

In Praise of Memorys Sins William L. Randall
ST. THOMAS UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT. In the course of normal aging, memory suffers losses in effectiveness, which, for many, spark anxiety about the onset of dementia. Against the background of Daniel Schacters (2001) overview of the seven sins of memory, this paper proposes that the line between normal and dementing is less definite than we may think. Indeed, when the narrative complexity of memoryi.e., autobiographical memoryis taken into account, such sins are not merely necessary evils but outright advantages, essential to the capacity of memory to equip us with a sense of self that is capable of coping with the challenges of later life, if not vital to the development of wisdom. As an incipiently literary work, the text of memory is characterized by an assortment of inadequacies-cum-qualities which, like Schacters sins, enable it to carry out its all-important mission: namely, sponginess, impulsiveness, and blurriness; tangledness, backwardness, and deceptiveness; compressibleness, moodiness, and malleableness. KEY WORDS: aging, dementia, memory, metaphor, narrative, wisdom

Normal and Dementing Yesterday, it was the file filled with students essays that apparently I misplaced. Then there were the groceries I forgot to stop for on my way home from work. When I woke this morning, I was in a fuddle about whether I actually paid my electric bill last week or merely dreamed I did. Later, I felt that flash of panic when I chanced upon my neighbour in the shopping mall but could not, for the life of me, recall her name! Tomorrow, who knows what it will be? Benign senescent forgetfulness: the poetic-sounding label for my absent-minded episodes, its DSM-like seriousness softened by the blessed word benign. For someone of my advancing years, with the usual shifts and shrinkage in the hardware of my aging brain, it seems Im normalmore or less.

THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY VOL. 20 (2): 147169 The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345635 http://tap.sagepub.com

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A label like dementia, on the other hand, carries no such consolation, given the massive toll exacted by its various manifestations on those whose lives it strikes: not just Alzheimers, with its sad mess of plaques and tangles, but other forms as well. In no way do I wish to trivialize this tragedy, nor (admittedly) to deal with it directly. Instead, my intention is to propose a line of thinking that might place our anxiety concerning itour dementia-phobiain perspective. Rather than a happy ending to the dementia story (would that there were one!), I seek a more realistic reading of the normal one. As a gerontologist, interested in the inside of aging and the psychology of growing old (Ruth & Kenyon, 1996), my problem is less with the attentionmedical and mediathat dementia is duly receiving than with certain enduring understandings, nave in nature, of what memory is and does. Explicitly or not, such understandings are often rooted in analogies of cognition as computation and in lingering assumptions that memories are reliable replications (photocopies, practically) of what technically took place. Once these assumptions are bracketed, however, memorys more creative and (dare I say?) more literary sides are allowed consideration. Considering them reveals the difference between normal and dementingand, by extension, us and themto be markedly more fuzzy: a difference less of kind than of degree (see Milwain & Iversen, 2002, pp. 6469). Without in any way diminishing the horror that it represents, dementia is thus contextualized as a hideous exaggeration of the very sorts of sins, as psychologist Daniel Schacter (2001) dubs them, by which, for most of us, memory is eventually beset. Alluding to the ancient list of deadly ones, he identifies the seven failures or transgressions (p. 4) that memory regularly commits: transience, or the gradual fading of our memories over time; absent-mindedness, as in the two examples that I mentioned at the start; blocking, as in being suddenly incapable of recalling ones neighbours name; misattribution, or confusion as regards a memorys source; suggestibility, which refers to memories implanted by others but experienced as our own; bias, or revising our recollections in light of what we know in the present; and, finally, persistence, the inability to forget what, frankly, we would rather not remember. In what follows, my aim is scarcely to quibble with Schacters masterful assessment of memorys several sins. Quite the contrary. It is to add support to it from a narrative perspective, in the light of which such errors (Schacter, 2001, p. 3) are more like necessary evilsindeed virtues reallyif the text of memory is to equip us with a sense of self sufficiently resilient to greet the challenges of later life. And though I leave this possibility to another time to explore in more detail, they provide us with fodder for the wisdom that, traditionally, age is assumed to bring. Before outlining my own (nine-fold) litany of memorys peccadillos, I need to say a word on metaphor.

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Metaphors for Memory By memory, in this context, I do not mean memory for information (semantic memory) or memory for how to do things (procedural memory). Though the various types of memory invariably overlap, what I mean here is episodic memory or autobiographical memorymemory as we most commonly employ the term: memory for episodes and experiences which, for some strange reason, we cling to as pertinent to who we are as persons. It is memory for our self, the sort that until surprisingly recently has gone somewhat unexplored (see Draaisma, 2004; Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Rubin, 1996). The shudder that runs through us at the merest hint of dementia is rendered all the more unnerving, then, because what it seems to threaten is our innermost identity. At the same time, the shadow of dementia may be shedding light on what philosopher Edward Casey (1987), approaching memory from a phenomenological (not empirical) perspective, laments to be the general decline in esteem which memory has suffered in modern times (p. 6). If Caseys claim is valid, then our unease around dementia may conceal a deeper, nagging sense that we have forgotten what memory is and can mean (p. 2). Paradoxically, the very devastation of memory, physiologically, may be inviting us to re-conceive what, psychologically, normal memory does. For Casey, the reasons memory has been forgotten are the very reasons we have come to know as much about it as we havethe mechanics of it, anyway. Tracing the fate of memory from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment and beyond (p. 4), he argues that the rise of the science of memory, despite its undeniable ingenuity ... and its many methodological merits, is, in itself, the symptom of a pervasive subsiding of interest in memory (p. 8). Given the myriad ways in which memory has succumbed to mathematization (p. 16) note the preponderance of statistics when research into memory gets reported on in journalssuch rigor may be read as a failure to appreciate the rightful place of memory in the pantheon of essential powers of mind and body, self and other, psyche and world (p. 18). One might add the soulful place as well. In the view of philosopher Ian Hacking (1995), the science of memory was quite consciously ... created in order to secularize the soul ... to conquer that resilient core of Western thought and practice (p. 5). While such opinions can be heard to have a reactionary ring, historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma (1995/2000) makes an allied observation. It concerns the parade of technological developments across the centuries that have spawned over-arching metaphors for memorys basic operations. Through its close connection with such developments, not only has the psychology of memory derived status, Draaisma says, but, reflected in theory, memory came to look like the technologies it was modeled on (p. 231). The most recent such development, and one whose impact has proven stunningly persistent, is that of the digital computer. Witness the insight it has afforded us into the mysteries of memory as, at bottom, a complex enterprise of

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processing units of information, from input to output, through a sequence of logical-linear phases: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Potentially displacing the computational paradigm, and the computerspeak (Draaisma, 1995/2000, p. 159) in which it has issued (often used as if referring, not to metaphor, but to fact), are developments in the technology of neural imaging. Such advances permit a greater understanding of the intricate networks of neuronal activity that are involved at every stage: as memories are laid down at the outset, are retained over time, and are later on retrieved. In addition to freeing us a little from memory-as-machine analogies, neuroscience thus appears to nudge us closer to whatphysiologically, at least remembering entails. Yet whether we think in terms of neural systems or of computer ones, I would argue, we are operating in the realm of metaphor all the sameeven if the former is conceivably more literal in nature: offering us a framework for appreciating the effects on memorys vast machinery that are due to changes in the aging brain itself (see Cohen, 2005; Goldberg, 2005). What stands out from critiques like those by Casey and Draaisma is the wide array of metaphors that memory has inspired, and thus the risk of investing excessively in any one of them in particular. That said, and accepting that I lay myself open to more critique in turn, I want to toy with the merits of yet another metaphor for memoryautobiographical memory, that is: namely, the narrative root metaphor (Sarbin, 1986). The attention which the so-called narrative turn has attracted throughout the social sciences (including psychology), with its insights into the role of narrative thought in the economy of daily life (Bruner, 1987) and the narrative structure of memory itself (Rubin, 1996, p. 2), owes its momentum, not to advances in technology, but to an intensified awareness of the primal role of storiesforming them, telling them, sharing them in the history of humanity at virtually every level: social, psychological, political, ethical, even theological (see Hinchman & Hinchman, 1997). In light of this metaphor, which thinking in such areas as literary gerontology (WyattBrown, 2000), qualitative gerontology (Rowles & Schoenberg, 2002), and hermeneutical gerontology (Berman, 1994) is helping to legitimate, as is scholarship on autobiography per se (Eakin, 1999; Olney, 1998), memory can be looked upon as text. Whatever else it is, in other words, memory is analogous to a sprawling, multi-layered, incipiently literary work. Perpetually in progress, it is the very sort of work that we imply, in fact, when we indulge in homespun phrases like the pages of time or the story of my life. Memory, we could say, is a narrative creation that we are continually composing, as author (or co-author), narrator, character, and reader, all at onceand always from within: that is, after The Beginning yet before The End. To borrow from psychologist Dan McAdams (1996), writing on the concept of identity, memory is an internalized and evolving personal myth that functions to provide life with unity and purpose (p. 132). It is a novel-in-the-making (Randall, 1999), one might say: a novel that we weave, moreover, within an ever-shifting web of broader social systems, from our families to our friendships and our cultures

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to our creeds, each with its peculiar brand of narrative environment and its cadre of narrative resources (Freeman, 2000, p. 81). To echo a core social constructionist tenet, we story our liveswe compose our lives, we textualize our livesnot at all in isolation, but in intimate interaction with a complex set (or setting) of larger stories still. As scholars are proposing in the field of cognitive neuroscience, narrativity the capacity to formulate small stories (Turner, 1996, p. 12) to make sense of our immediate experiencemay actually be hard-wired into our basic neurological equipment (see Damasio, 1999). In effect, the neural complexity of the human brain underlies the narrative complexity of the human mind which is to say, the literary mind (Turner, 1996). Put differently, intersecting synapses find expression in the intersecting storylines that swirl around inside us: forever informing (or confusing) our emotions, guiding (or distorting) our relationships, constructing (or constricting) our Selves. My aim in the remainder of this paper, then, is to consider certain overlapping qualities (or, if you like, inadequacies) that are intrinsic to the narrative fabric of the self (Freeman, 1998)in short, to our texistence (Randall & McKim, 2008, p. 5). In doing so, I will be building on Schacters (2001) highly helpful work to advance the less than orthodox idea that such qualities-inadequacies, far from being nuisances that life obliges us to endure, are core requirements for the continuing developmentthe narrative developmentof the self by which we live (see Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Pivotal to growing old as opposed to simply getting old, they are pivotal as well, it can be argued, to the development of wisdoma concept with added currency nowadays, it seems, given the establishment of Defining Wisdom, an interdisciplinary project funded through the University of Chicago.1 The emergence of wisdomunderstood in terms not just of knowledge and judgements about the fundamental pragmatics of life, the dominant definition (see Baltes & Smith, 1990, p. 87; 2008), but also of self-understandingdepends precisely, I submit, on memorys imperfections (see Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 212246). An additional digression before I proceed: it is not my goal to demean the many discoveries concerning memoryconcerning its mechanics, if not its soulthat both computer science and neural science have enabled us to make. I am merely calling for an extension of the metaphors by which we imagine what memory is. From a narrative perspective, memory is not some sort of warehouse of audiovisual recordings of what actually took place. It is not a set of precise impressions of original events. Nor is it reducible to a sequence of logical functions or chemical-electrical impulses. Whatever else it might or might not be, memory is a continuous, ingenious, imaginative process; a process of making meaning; a textual process; a process of poiesis (McKim & Randall, 2007): one we are perpetually in the midst of and that, at bottom, cannot be pried apart from our evolving sense of self (see Beike, Lampinen, & Behrend, 2004). For better or worse, we are what we remember ourselves to be (Casey, 1987, p. 290).

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The Sponginess of Memory Perhaps the first observation to be made about memory is that, as all of us can easily attest, it is riddled with holesin much the same way as a novel is riddled with gaps (Iser, 1978). No novelist includes every last detail of every last event that the story as such implies. While writers like Laurence Sterne (witness Tristam Shandy) and Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past) may appear to do exactly that, the result is by and large an unreadable book. The whole story and nothing but cannot be told. By definition, a story is an intentional selection of events and details that leaves lots between the lines for readers to fill in from their respective stores of personal experience, remembered or imagined. Every novel, in E. M. Forsters phrase, is thus a spongy tract (as cited in Johnson, 2001, p. 112). Applying this feature to memory, and quite apart from the organic deterioration associated with dementia itself, most of us routinely forget much, much more than we can possibly recall. Not simply the vast majority of occurrences in the run of an average day, but entire patches of our past can all but disappear, like water beneath the bridge, leaving us little more than a few meagre arbitrarily chosen sets of snapshots, as T. S. Eliot (1933/1975) portrays them: the faded poor souvenirs of passionate moments (p. 91). Yet despite how infuriating this quality can be, such sponginess is essential, for a host of worthy reasons. For one, it is essential to our sanity, not just in the dramatic sense expressed by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (1988)I would lose my mind if I remembered everything (p. 254)but in the pragmatic sense that a fully remembered life would, at best, be quite unliveable. Famed Russian mnemomist Solomon Sherevsheshky, who was afflicted with the inability to ignore the minutaie of what passed before him and perceive some of it as more deserving of attention than the rest, could not, as psychologist A. R. Luria (1987) cautiously concludes, mature in the same way others do (p. 151). In her recent autobiography, The Woman Who Cant Forget (Price & Davis, 2008), Jill Price explores how her extraordinary memory is more often a curse than a blessing (McIlroy, 2008, p. F1). Now 33, writes reviewer Anne McIlroy (2008), she especially remembers what she was doing at any given moment (p. F2), going as far back as 1980, and most days since 1974. Indeed, some memories flash through her mind all day long, as if spliced into a disjointed home movie that plays constantly in her brain, often forcing her to relive over and over some of the most painful moments of her life (p. F2). Accordingly, she is impeded from ever truly leaving [her] toddler and teenage years behind. As Price herself admits, it is hard to grow up ... when you are always walking beside yourself (p. F2). If one were wont to wonder, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1994) does, what the completely remembered life would look like (p. 69), the plight of a Sherevsheshky or a Price permits an all-too troubling glimpse. The ability to function requires the ability to forgetif not entirely, then for all intents and

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purposesthe vaster portion of all we see and hear and do. Remembering and forgetting, Casey (1987) states, work hand-in-hand (p. 12). Nietzsche puts it more starkly: It is possible to live almost without memory, but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting (as cited in Ross & Buehler, 1994, p. 219). Integral to forgetting, of course, is prioritizing: evaluating the significance of what our senses present us with and either retaining it, in one form or another, or else discarding it altogetherdepending, obviously, on our priorities and agendas at the time. This leads to the point that forgetting is essential to making meaning, and thus to reasoning in general. As Draaisma (2004) says: with absolute memory we lack the power of abstract reasoning (pp. 6970). Abstraction necessitates stepping back and seeing broader patterns, not getting mired in the nitty-gritty. Abstraction is perceiving the outline of the forest as a whole, not being distracted by the specifics of particular trees. In Schacters words, if we, like ... Sherevshesky, were constantly overwhelmed by detailed memories of every page from our pasts, we would be left with no coherent story to tell (Schacter, 1996, p. 81). One could even claim that an overall sense of the story of my life is something that comes all the more naturally (and poignantly) with age, as the sharp shapes of certain episodes fade steadily from view and the whole emerges as more powerful and more meaningful than the sum of its various parts. Such possibilities bear noting in relation to our reputedly increased capacity in later life for post-formal thought (Csikszentmihlyi & Rathunde, 1990), central to which is a greater openness to ambiguity and uncertainty, irony and contradiction (Grams, 2001, p. 101). As it were, the very process of aging moves us away from thinking of things in terms of black-andwhitea tendency that can characterize our cognitive style at earlier or more conformist stages of development (see Loevinger, 1976)and inches us toward a tolerance for the greyer shades of life. Changes in our grey matter itself, so to speak, pave the way for wisdom (see Cohen, 2005; Goldberg, 2005). Three more quick points need making, though, in defense of memorys spongy side: its absorbency, in other wordsthe quality that, because of all the holes, soaks things up and makes other things possible. First, forgetting is essential to creativity. The great enemy of creativity, reckons Oscar Wilde, is a good memory (as cited in May, 1991, p. 68). The writers life, agrees novelist Diane Setterfield (2007), through the voice of her central character in The Thirteenth Tale, needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay (p. 46). Elsewhere (Randall, 2007), I have ventured the possibility that a compost heap might actually make much more apt a metaphor for memory than a computer, capturing better its organic side, its fertility, its service as a seedbed for intellectual-emotional growth, not to mention its textual complexity, as well. Indeed, though (theoretically) ones metaphors ought not to be mixed, memory-as-compost and memory-as-text weave in and out of one another with, I think, considerable conceptual ease.

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Next, forgetting is essential not just to the creation of art, leastwise literary art, but also to its appreciation. If forgetting is essential to abstract reasoning, then it is no less so to aesthetic reasoning, too. By this, I mean (among other things) the ability to appreciate the relevance of some image or story, some metaphor or myth, to ones own unique experience of the world. I would even offer that, in terms of metaphor in general, memory is nothing if not endlessly suggestive, and thus the meanings we can derive from it are gloriously indeterminatea dimension I will look at in a moment. Last, though hardly least, forgetting is essential to a feasible sense of self, something which, one might say, a Sherevsheshky lacked. The obverse of this, however, is that our sense of self is hardly grounded in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but ...; rather, in odds and sods of episodes that, for a multitude of reasons (few of them transparent), we are incapable of forgetting. In effect, it is rooted in the leftoversthe refuse, so to speak that remain from whatever else was happening at the time but that in some obscure corner of our hearts we cleave to as personally significant, then string together with other things as somehow key to who we arethe central plot of our identity, as it were, if not its guiding genre, too. Put bluntly, our most identity-determining memories are often memories of anomalies: incidents when things went strangely wrong (or right); departures from the norm and exceptions to the rule. Not the countless times when we have ridden in a cab, but the one weird time when the driver nearly got us killed. Not the myriad occasions on which we flossed our teeth, but the one unfortunate occasion when we choked on a dislodged filling. With normal memory, of course, we experience a fundamental continuity among such incidents. With dementia, so we assume, the continuity erodes, the string unravels, and the thread of the plot is lost (see Crisp, 1995). Yet even if it is, the difference, I would argue, is less of kind than of degree, and thus less definitive than we might think.

The Impulsiveness of Memory The sponginess of memory can scarcely be understood without admitting its impulsiveness as well. Memory, it often seems, has a will very much of its own. Rather than a passive repository of pictures of the past, it is an active and inventive force (Casey, 1987, p. 15). For author Andr Maurois (1956), it is a great artist (p. 157). As befits the stereotype of artists, memory can be notoriously capricious. We go through our day assuming that certain things must undoubtedly stand out, only to discover at the close of it that quite different things do instead. A week hence, who could have predicted it would be these odd images that we ended up retaining? Notes one scholar, things I would like to recall I cant recall. Things Id like to forget I cant forget. One doesnt get to choose which is which (Grimes, 1995, p. 73).

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Memory is impulsive not just in terms of what gets encoded (and what does not) but at the retrieving end as well. Why particular things pop into our heads at particular timeslike unguided missiles (Bickle, 2003, p. 200)is anybodys guess. While this devil-may-care quality seems innocent enough in relation to our day-to-day routines, it becomes immensely more unsettling in what it says about our sense of self, centered as that sense so often is around a set of self-defining memories (Singer & Blagov, 2004). Out of all of the events that we might have hung onto, in other words, why is it these events these moments, these embarrassmentsthat we did? What we hang onto, it could be claimed, or what persists, are what fits the over-riding story of self the evolving self-schema (Bruner & Feldman, 1995)that we have been quietly composing to date. In contrast, what fails to fit is unlikely to be remembered at all, or is remembered by another self perhaps, inasmuch as self is not singular but multiple in nature (see Bruner & Kalmar, 1998; Hermans, 2002). There are implications here, of course, for our concept of what my life as such amounts to: implications of interest, surely, to the therapists and counselors who seek to keep us sane. All in all, memorys sponginess, abetted by its impulsiveness, concerns what memorys text does not retain more than what it does. Regarding the latterthe relatively tiny proportion of material we have succeeded in absorbing from times relentless flow; the remains of our daysa host of added inadequacies bear looking into now.

The Blurriness of Memory Thinking back to a given period of our past, whether it be bringing up our children, working on our thesis, or heading off to war, how frequently we may say concerning it: its now all just a blur! Tomorrow, echoes poet P. K. Page (1994), a change of lens or soft-focus filter will alter the past. Its edges will smudge and blur, its embroideries and its subtleties disappear (p. 58). In his listing of the seven sins of memory, Schachter (2001) reserves the label transience for this potentially distressing (though all-too-familiar) phenomenon i.e., the past continually fading as the present brings us fresh experiences. As perhaps the most terrifying of memorys failings, it undermines its role in connecting us to past thoughts and deeds that define who we are (p. 40). Other researchers employ terms like degrade and decay (Bower, 2000, p. 13) to capture what takes place: terms that I appreciate, of course, for their compatibility with the compost heap. Without some element of degrading or decay (terrifying or not), there can never be fertility, and therefore growth, whether of soulas writers such as Thomas Moore (1992) insistor of wisdom. Although (again) memory and not wisdom is my focus here, it is worth noting that prevailing definitions of wisdom commonly conceive it in ethical-practical terms: as having to do with good judgement and actions that contribute to living

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well (Baltes & Smith, 2008, p. 56). So conceived, a crucial element of wisdom, perhaps its prerequisite, is the capacity to recognize patterns: in things, in thinking, in behavior, in the world. Neuroscientist Elkhanon Goldberg (2005) takes exactly this perspective, in fact, in defining wisdom as the availability of a rich repertoire of patterns enabling us to recognize new situations and new problems as familiar (p. 89). As he puts it, wisdom is intricately connected with memory, specifically with what he calls generic memories, namely memories for patterns (p. 125): not memories of particular experiencesof ordering a meal in a restaurant, for instancebut spread-out recollections of what ordering meals in restaurants most typically entails. Such memory, which psychologist Ulrich Neisser (1986, p. 79) labels repisodic, exemplifies how, as mentioned, episodic memory, procedural memory, and semantic memory are, in many ways, intimately linked. Pattern recognition is the ability to discern the forest amid the trees. Such an ability depends precisely on the smudging of the edges of particular events, even the most persistent ones, and the gradual eclipsing of their embroideries and subtleties to reveal to the receptive mind a bigger picture or a deeper trutha truth or two about oneself perhaps. Such a possibility brings us to where wisdom meets self-understanding, surely as important an element of wisdom as sound judgement about pragmatic matters. Whatever else it is, in other words, wisdom has to do with the process (never completed) of recognizing patterns: in our lives, our selves, our stories (see Randall & Kenyon, 2001; Randall & McKim, 2008). The connection here with a literary text is not difficult to make. When reading a novel, we need to bear in mind the information, the characters, and the events that the author has made pivotal to the plot. Yet our appreciation of the broad themes that the plot may mediate depends less upon the details of such things remaining vivid in our imagination than upon our talent for viewing themand re-viewing themin more general terms, as part (however key) of that overall unfolding, or thickening, of meaning that the story as a whole conveys.

The Tangledness of Memory From the blurriness to the tangledness of memory, it is a short, quick step. Where our own memories begin and those of other people end can often be impossible to say. Memory is not simply a private affair. For one thing, many of the episodes we remember are ones that we experienced in the company of others and thus can hardly be recalled without conjuring up images of who those others were and what they said or did. For another, from childhood on, our parents and siblings, classmates and friends tend to coach us, wittingly or otherwise, in which events deserve retaining and with which versions we should encode them and file them away (see Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 1996). What shape those versions take is tied in part, therefore, to the versions with

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which these co-authors story their lives, too. The topic of memory thus ushers us toward that vast, enchanting region where sociology and psychology converge. Certainly, when it comes to individual development, this is a fundamental tenet of a social constructionist perspective (see Gergen, 1994; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Ochs & Capps, 2002). Narratively and textually speaking, no one is an island. We are a part of all that we have met (Tennyson, 1842/1996)as they are a part of us. Memory-wise and therefore self-wise, we are hopelessly intermeshed with one anotheran insight that, paradoxically, harbours hopeful implications where dementia is concerned. If Self is defined less as a singular, atomistic entity than as multiple personaeor Selveswhich require the cooperation of others in order to come into being (Sabat & Harr, 1992, p. 443), and if each individual in the dementing persons circle inevitably elicits certain selves (linked, in turn, to certain memories), then the self of that person can in no way be said to be absent as long as these others continue to reflect their respective parts of it back. In this regard, we are not merely the co-authors of one anothers stories but the keepers of them, too. Remove enough loved ones from the circle of any of us, in fact, and we are bound to feel just a little bit lost: not quite our selves. But our worlds are entangled with those of others in a deeper sense as well, one that finds a parallel in the way that the text of a given novel borrows inevitably from themes and motifs in other novels too. In this respect, no novel is ever truly novel, but incorporates literary conventions that, so to speak, are in the air. Similarly, the formation and recollection of our memories is impossible without our adapting the various narrative templates (Abbott, 2002, p. 7) or forms of self-telling (Bruner, 1987, p. 16) that lie at our disposal amid the narrative environments of the larger settings that we story our lives within. Says psychologist Jens Brockmeier (2002), memory is not only a densely written text, but it is inextricably interwoven with the countless texts and contexts of culture (p. 457). In short, the textuality of our memory is inseparable from the inter-textuality of the worlds in which we live. Given how much the narrative structures of local cultures vary, as psychologist David Rubin (1996, p. 12) puts it, such insights obviously have enormous implications for both the content and the form of our evolving myth across the years. The tangled dimension of memory becomes evident in at least two more basic ways as well. The first is simply that our own memories are often interlaced with one another, such that recollecting a certain episodee.g., our first kiss on a date at a movieis apt to trigger other kissing memories that we have saved as well, not to mention memories of other dates at other movies. Activating additional recollections, each keyword involvedkiss, date, movieillustrates memorys complex cross-indexing system (Schank, 1990), because of which, whenever we slip into a reminiscent mood, one line of reminiscing invariably leads to others. Nor can anyone predict beforehand the directions in which we will be led. The second way, however, is possibly more disturbing.

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Subjecting certain recollections to especially close inspectionconducting a detailed reading of some salient memory from childhood, for instance could reveal that at its core lies less a single, solid, datable event than an amalgam of narrative debris (McKendy, 2006, p. 473)much of it implanted in our minds by othersthat at some stage, for some reason, we have cobbled together and claimed as our own. Drawing on her own childhood, memoirist Patricia Hampl (1999) provides a delightful example of just such a memory in a chapter aptly titled Memory and Imagination. Deconstructing the components of a memory she had retained of her first piano lesson at the age of 7 (though never written down), she discovers to her embarrassment that certain people and objects that figure in her recollection could not possibly have been part of her life at the time the event itself reputedly took place, or at least not in the combination that the structure of the memory assumes. In short, she says, I had told a number of lies (p. 25). It is tempting to indict what Hampl has recounted as false memory, yet, probably with minor effort, each of us could produce a comparable reminiscence part-cobbled, part-confabulatedwhose source is unsure and whose veracity has always been at issue, not just in others minds but even in our own. Such half-remembered, half-imagined incidents can seem innocuous enough, of course, until the day it dawns upon us (in therapy, for instance) how much our whole self-image has orbited around them. On this point, if material from the imagination seeps into memory over time, thenas psychoanalysts have insisted since the startthe opposite is true as well: material from memory is forever leeching into the imagination, only to emerge in strange, transmuted manner in the plots and themes of our fantasies and dreams. The boundary between the two domainsmemory and imagination, remembering and dreamingmust thus, I fear, be seen as much more fuzzy than we may be comfortable admitting. And with it, the line between normal and demented gets further blurred as well, to the point perhaps where a term like dreamentia might even have a place! In her reflections on the confabulatory storytelling in which her mother, a victim of Alzheimers, was perpetually engaging, nursing professor Jane Crisp (1995, p. 138) pleads for us to hear such tales as waking dreams (p. 133), replete with identifiable (and in their own way, reasonable) themes. They need to be heard, she says, not as aimless rambling (p. 134) but as, in some respects, intentional: as a strategy for survival, a way of propping up ones threatened ego (p. 138).

The Backwardness of Memory The tangledness of memory can also be discussed in terms of time. To borrow from Kierkegaard, though we live our life forward, we understand it backward. Quite literally, we remember back, after the fact. And the place from which we do so is obviously the present. Yet our viewpoint in the present is

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anything but neutral. Instead, it is a function of our perception of both the past that lies behind it and the future, or futures, that we anticipate will lie ahead. Since our experience of all three of thesetime past, time future, and certainly time presentis continually changing, subjective time, psychological time, or inner time in no way stands still. Subtle though the changes be, the past is forever shifting shape within us. The continual back-and-forth dynamic that is involved in the activity of rememberingas it is in reading a novelimplies something that, at first glance, could seem quite grave, until we realize how common, indeed inevitable, it is. The culprit, so to speak, is retrospective teleology (Brockmeier, 2001), which means our habit, when recounting a particular event, of doing so from the standpoint far less of how it felt at the time that the event originally occurred, when it was still quite open and its conclusion not quite clear, than of how things turned out in the end. In the exact same way we do when following a story of any kind, where past-tense narration is typically the norm and where our perception of the story as a whole is continually unfolding, we are, in effect, reading the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 176). According to philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1981), for whom narrativity and temporality go hand in glove, recollection invert[s] the so-called natural order of time (p. 176). Far from representing the past precisely as it happened, normal memoryof necessity, and by virtue of our experience of time itselfmis-represents the past.

The Deceptiveness of Memory Saying that memory misrepresents the past insinuates that it ought not to be trusted. And officially perhaps, it ought not, even if, practically, it can, and even if, in the main, our inner narrators serve us rather well. On balance, says Schacter (1996), our memory systems do a remarkably good job of preserving the general contours of our past (p. 308). That said, from what most of us can attest to without much debate, P. K. Pages (1994) assessment of the situation is equally apt: memory, trickster figure will let you down, she writes; a fiction writer offering alternate versions of what you had once imagined written in stone: the immutable facts of your life (p. 58). Says one psychotherapist, we tell ourselves stories of our past, make fictions or stories of it, and these narrations become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged (Pearson, 1989, p. xxv). While, for most of us at least, our memories are hardly outright fabrications, neither are they straightforward facts. They are, necessarily, interpretations. As such, they can range quite widely, even wildly, in terms of fidelity to original events. This is not at all to say that we are succumbing to dementia. Talented raconteurs may tell tall tales, yet we seldom say the same of them. Memory is a matter of faction, and, strictly speaking, all self-narration is unreliable.

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Bad faith and bias are simply a way of being, making self-deception... the normal pathology of everyday life (Crites, 1979, p. 125). Romanticizing, fantasizing, embellishing, embroidering, shrinking, stretching: all of these, to some degree, are inevitableand normalwhenever we remember. We can never succeed in recalling things exactly as they happened. In reciting our role in the midst of some past eventthe kind that we recount, for instance, with liberal doses of constructed dialogue (I saidshe said) and with certain aspects emphasized while others are quietly ignoredwe routinely either puff ourselves unfairly up or put ourselves unduly down. As for where the truth might lie in our reconstructions, who can say? To quote famed editor William Maxwell (1980), we lie with every breath (p. 27). This is not to say that seeking to be more truthful in our tellings is pointless, or is irrelevant to our development or healing; simply that the truth as suchwhere by the phrase we mean things exactly as they happenedcan in no way be attained. What is needed where memory is concerned, therefore, is a different conception of truth altogether, a different standard: truth not of a technical sort, in other words, but a textual one instead (see Freeman, 2003, 2010; Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 155159).

The Compressibleness of Memory Related to both deceptiveness and blurriness is the fact that, given the backward dynamic of our experience of time, particular recollections are, of necessity, mere summaries (more or less condensed) of the incidents at their heartjust as the events in the plot of a novel are never told, cannot be told, with all of their details intact: details that are left for readers to provide themselves from their respective collections of remembered experience. At the time, of course, the incident at issue was encircled by a field of possible conclusions, only one of which could be actualized in the end. In the fullness of time, that is, the incident was still open. Sooner or later, though, and this is obviously a factor in the sin of transience, a single event emerges, writes literary scholar Gary Morson (1994), such that the other possibilities usually appear invisible or distorted. In this respect, a field is mistakenly reduced to a point, and, over time, a succession of fields is reduced to a line (pp. 119129). What is more, the lines of memory are easily entangledas any of us has discovered in those exacerbating moments of dipping into the distant past only to find ourselves hard-pressed to keep our stories straight: to have a precise recollection of one episode, one person, one period that is not tied up with the traces of other recollections. As well, the force exerted on our reminiscences by the passage of time itself relentlessly thins the lines down, consigning them to ever deeper levels in the compost heap. In consequence, there is simultaneously a steady thickening in us, too, with our memory acquiring what Casey (1987) calls its thick autonomy (p. 266)where thick means

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(among other things): sedimented in layers; a depth not easily penetrable by the direct light of consciousness; temporal density; and, the aspect I turn to now, concentrated emotional significance (pp. 265266).

The Moodiness of Memory The compost metaphorwith which, as I say, the narrative metaphor shares a certain kinshipcalls to mind a comment made by author Thomas Moore (1992). In Care of the Soul, where he considers how the soul feeds on life and digests it, creating wisdom and creativity out of the fodder of experience (p. 250), he observes that the past often lies shrouded in a cloud of melancholy, an emotion that is appropriate to memory as the musty odor of decay to old furniture and buildings (pp. 89). Putting an optimistic spin on things, he adds that melancholy is an emotional mustiness that signals the presence of soul (p. 9). Such thinking prompts a brief digression to identify an element of memory that remains comparatively unexplored: the emotionality, or moodiness, of memory. The notorious selectiveness of memory that I talked about in relation to its sponginess and impulsiveness depends upon which events possess significance for us personally, which generally means emotional significance. To put it simply, what we end up hanging onto (consciously or otherwise), out of all that we might have hung onto, is likely what struck us at the time as particularly funny or frightening or sad. Conversely, in the present, if we are experiencing a certain feelingbe it sad or mad or glad (or some combination of the three)then it is arguably because certain storylines have been set swirling around inside of us. Though biochemistry surely plays a part, there are reasons that we feel what we feel, in other words, and many of them are narrative in nature. Emotions have narrative roots (Schweder, 1994; Singer, 1996) and narratives activate emotions. (No wonder we nickname moving pictures movies, for they move us, often several ways at once.) To express this symbiosis differently: memories trigger moods and moods elicit memories. Respecting the connections between memory and emotion, emotion and narrative, narrative and memory is vital to honoring the dynamic complexity of our emotional livesall the more so as we age and the sheer volume of material in the novel of our life lends thickness to our feelings: to those like loneliness or longing, nostalgia or regret, but to more positive feelings too, like happiness or lovenot to mention such attitudes as irony and humor or such cognitive achievements as insight and wisdom. Yet as long as research into memory is limited to laboratory settings and tests of our recollection of lists of random words; as long as we view the whole topic of memory as distinguishable somehow from that of meaning or wisdom or time; as long as we study memory in terms of the categories of science and not also of the humanities and the arts, then we have a long way to travel in puzzling out its complicated moody side

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as well. The challenge extends, of course, to puzzling out the factors that are at work when a certain piece of music suddenly enlivens the person with dementia, triggering a certain mood and, with it, it would seem, images of the persons past, blurred or tangled though those images may be.

The Malleableness of Memory From sponginess to moodiness to any other of memorys sinful ways, the remembered past is revealed as anything but dead. Indeed, it is amazingly alive, far more malleable to reinterpretation than we may be comfortable admitting. To adapt a distinction made by literary scholar Roland Barthes (1977/1989), it is not a closed work but an open text. Episode by episode or overall, the past is forever amenable to revisionto restorying (Kenyon & Randall, 1997) or rewriting (Freeman, 1993)since both the present that we occupy (and are biased by) in reading it, and the anticipated future by whose light we read, are continually in flux, as are the relationships in which our versions of ourselves are co-authored into shape. No one rendition of a given recollection is therefore definitive. When it comes to lifestories, insists McAdams (1993), nothing is ever final. Things can always change (p. 278). Yet, rather than infuse us with the thrill of narrative freedom (Gullette, 2004, p. 158), such changeabilitysuch plasticitymight trouble us instead. Rather than a sense of possibility, we might suffer the burden of openendedness (Grams, 2001, p. 110). All the more so if we are of the mind that the past is past: end of story!, which is to say, if we are narratively foreclosed. Narrative foreclosurea condition with multiple factors feeding it, both personal and socialhas been defined by psychologist Mark Freeman (2000) as the premature conviction that ones life story has effectively ended (p. 83). In other words, our life as such continues onbeyond retirement, for instancebut in our hearts our story is all but over. Restricted by such a conviction, writes Morson (1994), we live in epilogue time (p. 193). Gerontologist Lawrence McCullough (1993) gives us yet another term: arrested aging. In his reflections on the power of the past to make us aged and old, he observes that time ... has the power to arrest some lives, to bring them to a stop, without death occurring (p. 185). Accordingly, we lose the ability to respond to time (p. 186) and become imprisoned in a past that seems to allow no escape (p. 191), a past which, in effect, contains all that really mattered to us and which we continue to return to through obsessive or escapist reminiscence (see Wong, 1995). In a real sense, we are stuck in the past: set in our ways of interpreting it. In consequence, our self-story is narrow, restricted, and small, just at that stage, one could argue, when to cope with the challenges and losses of aging, we need it to be expansive, resilient, and strong (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 141144).

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Research into reminiscencethough, thus far, rarely linked to research on autobiographical memory as such (Bluck & Alea, 2002)continues to expand. Among the types of reminiscence identified to date (see Webster & Haight, 2002), besides reminiscence that is primarily escapist or persistently obsessive, and that keeps us living in the past and not off of it, there is transmissive and instrumental reminiscence (Wong, 1995). In addition there is integrative reminiscence, a type that is associated with the task of life review, identified by Erik Erikson (1982/1998) as a prerequisite for wisdom. A variation on integrative reminiscence, which I believe is vital to consider when it comes to forestalling narrative foreclosure, is discussed by gerontologists Sally Chandler and Ruth Ray (2002) in an article appropriately titled New Meanings for Old Tales. They call it dynamic reminiscence (p. 77). Dynamic reminiscence is what any of us engage inwhether in the company of friends, in therapy, or simply by ourselveswhen we review certain memories in a particularly exploratory fashion: not necessarily the set pieces that we have told on numerous occasions in the same essential manner, but those with perhaps more than their share of emotional potency, of unresolved developmental business. Mulling them over, we come up with fresh discoveries, stumble onto novel themes, and become aware of recurring issues that call for closer reading, in the process freeing us up for continuing development: for expanding and enriching, deepening and strengthening, the story by which we live. Geropsychologist Ernst Bohlmeijer and his colleagues in the Netherlands have come up with a variation on dynamic reminiscence that they call creative reminiscence (Bohlmeijer, Valenkamp, Westerhof, Smit, & Cuijpers, 2005). Used with older adults in the grip of depression (a synonym, perhaps, for narrative foreclosure?), it encourages them to create and discover metaphors, images, and stories that symbolically represent the subjective and inner meaning of their lives (p. 302). In both dynamic and creative reminisence, memory thus proves limitless in its interpretability. Perhaps especially where metaphor and symbol are concerned, it is infinitely suggestible and endlessly open; all the more so as we age, potentially, and have that much more internal text with which to play. As with the most potent works of literature, so with the work we call our life: though the story itself must come to an end, there is no end whatever to the meanings we can glean from it. Meaning-wise, memory is anything but fixed. It is indeterminate. It is open. Our lives, as Freeman (1993) sums things up, are richly ambiguous texts ... whose meanings are inexhaustible, ... whose readings cannot ever yield a final closure (p. 184).

Closing Thoughts Musing on memorys foibles, Schacter (2001) insists that, in the final analysis, they need viewing as by-products of otherwise adaptive features of memory, a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in

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many respects (p. 184). Expressing his point more positively still, memorys vices are also its virtues, he says, elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world (p. 206). Clearly, my own musings here (preliminary ones, admittedly) incline me to agree, with aging itselfat least where memory is concernedemerging in a much more positive light. Whether it be the sponginess of memory, its tangledness or moodiness, such qualities are not to be written off as sad symptoms of memorys maddening inability to get things right, or, worse, the certain sign that dementia is just around the bend. Precise reproductions of the past, exactly as it happened, might be the ideal where computational models of memory are implied, but they are of limited use in livingand thrivingin the real world. They are less a blessing than a curse. Memorys sins are simultaneously its, and our, salvation. When all is said and done, they enable us to develop a viable sense of self, a self-story that is open enough and flexible enough to rise to the challenges that later life presents: challenges, all too often, to our sense of identity, of meaning. And, just possibly, they equip us with a cache of accumulated material that is sufficiently thick and sufficiently settledsufficiently decayed, that isto grow ourselves a heart of wisdom.
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WILLIAM L. RANDALL is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gerontology at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. His research interests are in narrative gerontology and the storied dimensions of human life. The author of The Stories We Are (University of Toronto Press, 1995), he has published in such periodicals as Narrative Inquiry, the Canadian Journal on Aging, and the Journal of Aging Studies. His most recent book, with Elizabeth McKim, is Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old (Oxford University Press, 2008). ADDRESS: William L. Randall, Dept. of Gerontology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada, E3B 5G3. [email: brandall@stu.ca]

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