“Memory,” the poet Alexander Smith wrote in 1863, is “a man’s real possession… In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.” The title of the particular essay this comes from is “Death and Dying,” and memory certainly can be a sobering topic. Even in 2007, for all the wonders of technology, it remains an absolute limit: the history that living eyes have seen creeps behind us, reaching back only a century or fractionally more. The title of world’s oldest human has, since 13th August 2007, been held by 114-year-old Edna Parker of Indiana, born on 20th April 1893: no human being now alive saw the year 1892.
Consider Henry Allingham, who at 111 is the oldest of the 23 veterans of the first world war still alive today, and one of only 3 British veterans living. Within a few years, this epochal event will have passed from living memory; the government announced in June last year that the death of the last known British first world war veteran would be marked by a national memorial service at Westminster Abbey. It’s a slightly macabre thought, and also begs the question—what else should we be commemorating? It can be surprising how long, and how, the past lingers. In 1869, the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War which founded the United States died. In 1956, the last surviving member of the Union Army which fought in the American Civil War died. It was as recently as 1993 that the last surviving veteran of the Boer War died.
In one sense, this is all incredibly banal. Only a tiny slice of history can ever “live” in memory, while every experience comes only once. In another sense, however, anything that puts history and mortality into fresh perspective has its value—and it is worth being reminded that talking to a living person about events they have witnessed is a privilege that time constantly revokes.
Perhaps it is more correct to say that he (man) is possessed by his memory.
One drawback I find of being in the midst of a technological revolution is that I increasingly find that I barely rely on my memory for events in my life, apart from the most important and vivid of course.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr allow my friends and I to upload photos for all to see - a “collective memory”. My mobile phone holds all the contact details, reminders and important notes I need. And rememeber the details of a public event when I can find images, audio, video, reviews and commentary from any number of websites, including ones we create ourselves such as blogs.
The best memories I have are ones that are private, ones that aren’t recorded by technology and exist purely in my head.
Phillip K Dick wrote a wonderful novel about a TV personality in a digital culture whose identity is erased, both from all computer records and from people’s memories. Thus he ceased to exist.
The Americans actually conducted a practical experiment on this in Guantanamo, by keeping prisoners in total sensory seclusion (blackout and no sound) for extended periods. Apparently after a while one loses ones mind.
Perhaps it is also a sign of poverty when we forget the present.
That is a very sad thing to call practical experiment what americans are doing in Guantanamo, don’t you think? But the novel is really wonderful…and frightening!
This “collective memory” is the most amazing thing our world has produced! But it also points to a dangerous path: we are creating and recreating it all the time, reinventing ourselves and the world many times just to escape “reality”, which memories will we hold then?
If we can´t rely on our most private memories, maybe then we cease to exist..
PS: Sorry for my poor english, I am brazilian..
Adilia - An interesting point about the continuous creating and recreating of the “collective memory” (Might have to claim copyright that phrase, if it’s not been done already…). It all sounds like going down the path of an Orwellian dystopia.
And I intend on reading Phillip K Dick’s novel after Daniel’s recommendation.
Adilia, your English is beautiful.
Yes, it is beyond sad.
Ben
The book can be found here:
http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels_flowmytears.html
Daniel
Yes, on the one-hand the creation of ‘collective memory archives’ - like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace - are a massive leap forward. Technology will hopefully give future historians access to the ‘memories’ of not just the rich and powerful, but also to the lives of ordinary people with perhaps less glamorous but still valuable recollections that in the past would just be lost.
What I find more frightening though is the Orwellian point. What is there to prevent these collective memories coming to be edited, shaped and controlled by a new techo-elite? Politics isn’t absent from the web and some of the content of sites like wikipedia - which represent this kind of amateur, collectivist approach to knowledge - is already controversial.
If we increasingly come to rely on digital media to be our archive how will we prevent the hijacking of our ‘collective memory’ by those ultimately in control of that media? It’s almost as if we’re slowly giving our memories away.