Individual memory is a fickle thing. It’s not at all the photographic document we try to use it as. That is why eye witnesses to a crime, or to any charged incident or to anything, really, are so unreliable. It’s common, for example, to mistake the woman in the orange sweater who your remember seeing running away from the incident, you think, to your old Aunt Norma who had a similar sweater and who wasn’t running at all, just walking by, as an example.
Relying on memory for anything, even recipe ingredients, is very shaky. I became a compulsive list maker the summer of my 19th year, my friend Libby taught me, and I have never relinquished that. Now, of course, I actually have to write things down in order to retrieve them quickly, but I also think trying to commit minutiae to memory is a sucker’s bet. That part of your brain should be used for song lyrics and that one pasta dish,(what was it?) that you want to try at home.
Collective memory, however, while not always factual, is always germane. Old myths and legends from long ago still hold true, except for Johnny Appleseed who was, apparently a child molester. Without him, however, we would still have the apples brought over from Europe and Mesopotamia – grainy, small, mealy and prone to worms. So, the Disney version, which has supplanted both legend and fact, is a better one in this case.
In other cases, collective memory is spot on. Because of that we have images of women, fertile women, made by ancestors many thousand years ago. We remember how hard the hunt for protein was and if we don’t remember personally, we have cave paintings to prove it. We remember how potent songs and music about love are, and if we don’t remember it, we have thousands of years of European-Latin American- Asian-African love songs to remind us.
I am getting older. Sometimes it takes me hours, or even a day, to remember the name of a movie or a book. But somewhere, someone else, will remember it for me and we can talk about it and even watch it.
Collective memory tells me that despots fade, Dictatorships fall apart. I know this because other people remember it and tell me about it through their writing and art. The are my collective memory now. They are my buoy.