From Mind and Memory

By Eli Siegel

What we present below—with pride and gratitude—appeared first in issues 334-336 of TRO, under the editorship of Martha Baird. It is an excerpt of a 1949 lecture by Eli Siegel on the tremendous, beautiful, and also much-worried-about subject of Memory.

MEMORY IS SOMETHING which hasn’t been explained. By itself, it shows that we have to do with things far away. As I’ve said in lessons very often, everyone can remember a lake or a mountain or a street or a landscape or a sky, and somehow all these things are within oneself.

A purpose of life, it can be said, is to have happy memories, with the feeling that you aren’t afraid to remember anything. We are afraid to remember because we are afraid to see. When I say no person should forget anything, people think, “Oooh, then you have to remember illness all the time?” I don’t mean that. The reason some persons can’t forget an illness or a fear is because they don’t want to remember things in general.

I say we can remember things in proportion. Suppose a person has to remember something about cancer. If he could remember that thing in relation to everything that was not cancer, it wouldn’t be harmful. But when people remember a bad thing, they remember it so isolatedly that it seems to be unendurable, and therefore they think they ought to forget.

Aesthetic Realism definitely says anyone who tries to forget anything is foolish. The idea is to see everything in proportion. We don’t have to be burdened by any painful fact as long as we give it company. If we see it by itself, it will be a burden. And therefore the idea always should be to place it, never forget it. Any time we forget something or want to forget something, what we are doing is declaring war on the source of all memory, which is reality itself.

Experience, in the long run, is the same as memory. Experience is that which has become ourselves because we have gone through it. Memory is the world as it is in us. If our memory is looked on by us as a necessary but bothersome invader, then our memories may likely grow bad; and sometimes people remember some things excessively because they don’t want to remember other things. The first thing in memory is not so much to be able to remember telephone numbers or all kinds of names; it is to have a proportionate attitude to all reality. Some people, for instance, can remember figures, but they don’t remember people. We play unconscious tricks with the world. We say, “Here there will be a bulge, and there there must be an emptiness.”

The first thing we should find out is whether we’ve wanted to remember, and what kind of things have we wanted to remember? Every time we remember something, we have been saying, “You and I, World, have got along, because things in you are now part of me.” What is memory if not that? Memory happens to be the residuum of a friendship still going on. It can be changed to a residuum of a hatred still going on. But it is a residuum; and if we want to meet the future, we have to see how we’ve arranged the past.

Sometimes people, because they remember a bad thing, cannot see anything good. All they know is that a certain person left them; they were jilted; somebody did them dirt; a person stopped loving them. Such a fact sticks out. It is interesting to see that there are two phases of memory: one is, memory is hazy; and the other: it sticks out like a clothespin.

Memory can be sharp and can be wide, and sometimes it gets too pointed. To have a fixation is to have a memory that insists on pointing and bothering and, to use a word from the Yiddish, “noodginin.” However, memory can be used in a good way. An example of that is in the famous poem by Leigh Hunt, “Jenny Kiss’d Me.” If we remember one thing in the world we can definitely say is good, the past can take on a beautiful meaning. This is a poem in praise of memory:

If there were one thing in the past we could say all of us was for, something that was beautiful, it would soon have company. It would spread out. It would be like a growing candle; the light would grow sharper and would grow wider. To say there is one thing in the world that we like, is a starting point. And that is why, as I pointed out last week, people will fight like anything before they say there was one good thing for them. They’ll struggle and they’ll mutter, but they won’t say it, because once you find one good thing in the world, it means there is something good in it—just as, if you found one living thing in Death Valley, it wouldn’t be Death Valley any more. Out of life can come more life. That is why this poem of Leigh Hunt is remembered.

The Diversity of Memory

Anybody can forget things. Anybody has the possibility of arranging experience to suit himself. Once he does that, he is saying, “I don’t have to get certain things in my mind; I can get just those things that I like. Why should I remember what I don’t want to remember? My mind belongs to me and I can evict anything I want; I’m the landlord of my memory and there is no rent control. Kick out anybody!”

Now, people do that. Then after having gone through their youth and middle age, in later years, that which was a trick once becomes an inevitability. People have not wanted to remember the things that didn’t seem suitable; they’ve done a lot of evicting; they have done a lot of rearranging and distorting. And then later, they don’t remember.

Let us say that I mention a fact like this: there is a boulder in Cayuga County, and on a May morning it is going to have a red ribbon on it. Whether you like it or not, if you’ve been listening, you’re going to get a picture of a boulder and a red ribbon on it. It is part of your mind, and it has lots of company.

The first thing we have to see about memory is its tremendous diversity. I say there is a boulder in Cayuga County with a red ribbon on it; but I can also say that there is a dirty kitchen sink in Brownsville. What are you going to do? Somehow the dirty kitchen sink in Brownsville has to get along with the boulder and the red ribbon. I also say that tomorrow there will be a child and it will have a dirty face and its nose may be running. So now you’ve got a child with a dirty face and its nose running; these are three things.

Then I ask you to remember an aunt of yours, and remember her face. You’ve got four things, and there are hundreds and thousands of others. That is memory. Now they all come to be part of you. The question is, how do they come to be part of you? What is it that makes us remember a tree and a dirty kitchen sink and spaghetti on a dirty dish and a man with a dirty apron and a woman in a tennis suit and maybe a snapshot of a governor? What is it that makes us remember all these things?

Furthermore, if I say to you right now, “the sizzling of onion,” you can remember, to a degree, a smell. People will do that differently. If I tell you “a song of Schubert,” there will be a memory—I was not mentioning a particular song. I say “the Battery.” There is a memory. “A girl friend or boy friend at school”—there is a memory. There is a memory of touch; somehow we remember the way things felt. There is a memory of taste.

So we have things heard that are remembered; things seen that are remembered; things smelled that are remembered; things tasted that are remembered. All the senses have their memories, and they all become part of us. I mentioned the boulder in Cayuga County with the red ribbon on it; but the sizzling of an onion near steak is also a memory. A movement of Beethoven is a memory. A picture is a memory. How does all this become part of ourselves? That is the unconscious too; and it is a tremendous thing, because we don’t decide to remember.

There are millions of things, really, in people’s minds; and somehow they all make a one—because as I mentioned the steak and the sizzling onion next door to the boulder and the ribbon, I don’t think there was any collision; there was no bumping; they just fell into place. How did it happen?

Memory, then, is a great coordinator; it is a great composer. But let us suppose that, though the unconscious memory we have is after composition, we ourselves don’t want it. We want to select those things that are nice for us. So we would be at war with our unconscious. The chief reason people don’t remember things is because they think they can get to a unity of ego by leaving out things. In doing this, they do feel guilty, because the first cause of guilt is the lessening of the world.

We find that there is a tremendous composition in memory. We touch something, we hear something, we remember something, we remember our remembering. All this makes up a tremendous one. It is the great mystery of reality that in any one mind, there is the memory of a mountain, the memory of an aunt, the memory of a kitchen sink, the memory of a melody, the memory of a tomato, and hundreds of other things. How did they all get into our minds; what keeps them there; what composes them there? Why is it that if I mention “tomato,” you can think, if you want to, of a red handkerchief or even something further away? I don’t know what people will think of right after tomato. It depends upon how tomato has fared historically with them.

But the fact remains that any one mind is a homage to the world because it is a tremendous composition of experience. We, however, can be against that composition. We just take for granted that the world gives us memory—we’ve remembered all our lives. But it is a wonderful thing, and by itself it shows that we are for the world. Any time a person remembers something, it shows he is for the world. We don’t want to remember that which in no way is for us.

How Can We Like the Past?

Most people’s memories are made up of vanity and fear. That is a bad baggage. And the only way to change those memories is to want to look at them. The question should be: “Did I use my childhood as a means of hiding, or as a means of seeing that this world in its mystery is inseparable from me, and the more I respect it the better for me?” Most children don’t get that feeling. Most children are so flattered by their fathers and mothers, and also made so afraid by people’s not understanding them, that they get into a state of swollenness of conceit and scantiness of self-courage—though they can have courage of another sort.

There are two things that should be seen in relation to memory. One is regret. Regret is a feeling that we weren’t right, with the discomfort arising from this. The regret, however, is not accompanied by any kind of moral censuring of ourselves. What we feel is that we weren’t so smart, we weren’t so lucky.

And then there is remorse. Remorse is the sense of mistake, with a feeling of guilt. The question is, if we don’t like our past, how can we like it? The first way to like it is to say definitely that we don’t like it, and no double talk. If we play politics, we are going to get pain.

The next thing we have to see is that the past can be changed. If we look at it differently, no matter how many years later, at that moment, it is changed. To look at the past differently is to change it; but we have to make sure we have looked at it honestly.

We can use the past to understand the present. We can use the past also to like the future better. But most regret about the past is a fake thing. What we want to say is, we didn’t get the breaks. Because of this, we unconsciously get the feeling that circumstance and ourselves are in competition, and we have to play a very cautious game, and we have to maneuver. Most people spend their time prowling through the world, maneuvering, being cunning, being crafty, and thinking the world is a streetcar where you get in without paying. This sort of thing is very customary.

Now, if we have, as a child and later, played all sorts of games with the past, we should certainly understand those games; and we can. Otherwise, we are going to use our memories as a hindrance to ourselves.

Most people want to be forgetful so they can have peace. Most going to bed is used as a means of forgetting. I tell you, every time you want to forget God’s world or evolution’s world in any way, you are being stupid; and furthermore, evolution doesn’t like it. Life isn’t long enough for us to forget anything. And this doesn’t mean that if we had an accident, all we have to do is think about that accident. I don’t mean fixation, I mean proportion. Nothing is ever to be forgot; and any person who thinks remembering is the same as worrying, doesn’t know English. If we remember something and place it, we aren’t going to worry about it. It is only disproportionate remembering that is worry in the bad sense.

Tonight, ever so many people will go to bed in order to forget everybody. What they don’t see is that they are killing everybody. We should be able to say: “I hope that in going to bed, I can make more sense out of these people, these things.” But people do go to bed to forget. To forget is to kill. That is what it amounts to in the unconscious. If we want to do anything in order to forget something, we are really showing contempt, and also showing a desire for spiritual slaughter. By this I mean that if a person, after reading a book, goes to play tennis, he doesn’t have to say he is forgetting the book. When you go from the second part of a Beethoven symphony to the third part, you don’t forget the second part. So you go from tennis to reading a book, and to a book from playing tennis; but not for the purpose of forgetting.

Suppose, for example, you looked at a picture and then you heard music. Are you going to kill the picture? Suppose, after eating a bit of meat, you took a glass of water. Are you going to say you hate the meat because you stopped eating it? But this is the sort of thing that people do.

Aesthetic Realism says definitely any person who consciously tries to forget anything is conceited and foolish. The thing he should go after is to place it in all other experience. A person, for example, who has been in a train wreck, doesn’t have to forget the train wreck; he should just place it with a whole other world that doesn’t consist of train wrecks.

If we felt that things, once they were in our minds, were good for us, we would want to remember them more.

It would be good if a person would say deeply: “I sort of respect this world to which I came to live; I sort of respect this world, which, whether I die or not, I’ll never really get out of—I’ll always be in it. Where will I go, whatever happens? I’ll always be in the world. Call it another world, it will still be a part of this one, so why not give it a break?”