Firstly, I was watching with a good friend of mine the movie, “Memento,” about a man who has complete short term memory loss. That is, he has a working memory, enough to perform regular tasks, and he has a long term memory for the time before he developed his condition; however, none of his new experiences become encoded into his long term memory. He may meet someone new and the only way for him to remember who they are is to picture their face and repeat their name over and over mechanically in his mind. Aside from this, he can take Polaroid pictures of people and write their names on the images, along with a word about who they are, which he does repeatedly. He even tattoos things on himself that he especially wants to remember, such as the fact that he wants to kill whoever murdered his wife. Yet he still lives in constant anxiety, not knowing who to trust or what rotten thing he may have done that he can’t remember. The worst thing is that he really doesn’t know who he is. His last memory is of his wife dying and so when he thinks of it, he sees himself as righteous, or at least pitiable, the avenger of his dead wife, but by the end of the movie, we learn this isn’t the case at all.(If you haven’t seen it, you may want to first before you read the rest of my comments, because I’ll probably give the ending away for you. On the other hand you may not want to see it, because it’s one of the darkest, most nihilistic movies I’ve ever seen. I can’t say that I recommend it. Yet it is profound, in so far as the depravity of man can be profound.) At the end of the movie, which is actually the beginning, since some of the scenes are arranged in reverse order chronologically, we learn that the main character, our protagonist no less, has already killed the man who killed his wife, but he can’t stop seeking revenge. He kills again and even writes himself a new clue, a fake clue, knowingly sending himself after an innocent person. He would rather live with his forgetfulness than remember what he’s done.
Secondly, I was wandering through Hastings, looking for a book for my mother for Christmas, and I found a book entitled, The Woman Who Can’t Forget. It’s the autobiography of Jill Price, now in her forties, who remembers every day of her life, since she was eight. Tell her a major public event, such as the Massacre in Tiananmen Square and she will tell you what exact date it occurred, June 4, 1989, and the day of the week, Sunday. Or, vice versa, give her any date and she will tell you what she was doing on that day and any other major or notable events that occurred on that day. Often while she’s blow drying her hair in the morning, she will recall all the other days of that particular date on that day of the week. For example, if it’s the Fourth of July, on a Wednesday, she will remember all the other Fourth of July’s that fell on a Wednesday in her life and what she did on each day. You would think that she would be a great student, but actually her mind has never worked well for memorizing the types of things one learns in school and on top of that she was constantly being distracted by a barrage of autobiographical memories, so that she became quite overwhelmed. She remembered, not only the good memories but the bad ones too, unable to filter out negative memories as normal people do.So here we have cases in which both too little and too much memory became a scourge. Yet how much better it is to remember more, rather than less! Remembering so much might be traumatic when one is young and forming one’s identity, but the cure for all that might be simply the encouraging voice of a parent or the wisdom that comes from living through those events and thinking about them in a new light. But how awful to not remember!
It occurred to me that the author of Memento, though he exaggerated circumstances of his character, was actually saying something about everyone. In fact his main character was an Everyman. Except this man was no hero. At first you’re on his side. He is a compelling protagonist, trying to find the man who murdered his wife, even when, as others point out to him, he will not be able to remember what he will do to the man when he finds him. Nevertheless, he’s trying to make the best of his horrible condition. But when the movie ends, we realize that we were tricked into sympathizing with this character in order for the author to reveal something about ourselves. That is, we all engage in willful forgetfulness to some degree. In fact, I realized that forgetfulness can be a part of a cycle. Sin, anxiety, and forgetfulness work together in a negative cycle. How do we stop? By remembering: “But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this thing.” Deuteronomy 24:18
On the other hand, as we learn from Jill Price, too much memory without interpretation can be crippling. She mentions a Garth Brooks song: "It's 4 in the morning. I'm lyin' in bed, A tape of my failures playin' inside my head." God doesn’t want us to remember everything, not other people’s every failure or our own, but there are so many things he wants us to remember, especially him and what he’s done for us. Our story with him is the most important.
