sovay | Like a mirror on a wall

Current Music: Robyn Hitchcock, "My Favourite Buildings"

Like a mirror on a wall

And on Sunday we took my father to see the Underground Railway Theater's From Orchids to Octopi for his birthday, thus completing culture weekend bingo; all I missed was the symphony. I should describe it before it closes. I should also talk about Coppélia, which I would love to see become Boston's regular spring ballet in the same way as The Nutcracker in winter. This post is going to do neither; it is, instead, an odd and somewhat demoralizing experience I had on Friday while waiting for

fleurdelis28 at the BU Theatre.

Because public transportation is like that, I'd budgeted a full hour for the bus and the T and instead arrived forty-five minutes in advance of the pre-show talk. Fortunately, I had brought Andrea di Robilant's A Venetian Affair—and even more fortunately, the box office let me pick up the tickets that were being held in Fleur-de-Lis' name, so I could wait in the foyer instead of the rain—and I was reading the eighteenth-century Venetian equivalent of phone sex and glancing up periodically to check for Fleur-de-Lis when a young woman came in. I knew her immediately. We had gone to high school together; she was a freshman when I was a senior, but we were both in Chorus and Concert Choir and stood next to one another in the soprano section; I wouldn't have said we were very close, because we never saw one another outside of school-related contexts that I can remember, but on the Europe trip in April we were part of the same knot of friends who talked on buses during the day, hung out in one another's hotel rooms almost every night: she is one of the people intimately tied up with my memories of cathedrals and madrigals and Amadeus at the Old Vic. I read Clysta Kinstler's The Moon Under Her Feet because I ran out of books in the second week of the trip (when were in France, meaning I couldn't hit up the bookshops as readily as in England: a useful experience, to be in a country where I was functionally illiterate and might as well have been mute) and borrowed the novel from her. I don't remember what about, but I remember good conversations in Canterbury. When we climbed up onto the roof of the hotel in Paris to watch the sun set over a skyline that reminded me of Tai-tastigon, I took photographs with her camera. To make up for the day she hurt her ankle and couldn't walk around the Champs-Élysées with the rest of us, I proposed to her on bended knee with a fifty-franc bouquet of flowers. She laughed and hugged me. "Is that a yes?"

She had no idea who I was. She recognized me enough to stop in front of me and say doubtfully, "Lexington High School?" but when I introduced myself by name, it clearly did not compute. Maybe I should have recited the anecdotes I've summarized above. Instead we traded the standard pleasantries, I lied to her about my situation, she mentioned she was married—to someone whose name rang a faint corroded bell from high school; I can't tell if I knew him or if he overlapped my brother—and then she drifted off with her family and I read A Venetian Affair and Fleur-de-Lis showed up and we watched an awesome opera. And I am aware that all experience is subjective; that I remember clearly many people who wouldn't know me from a boot to the head. But that kind of polite, blank strangeness from someone I'd ten years ago considered a solid friend unsettled me. I don't think I've changed that much in looks. I didn't own a leather jacket then, but I haven't cut my hair. And while I don't suppose it will keep me up all night, this line of thought turns much too easily into the narcissistic, neurotic kind of Ich-und-Du speculation: when I thought we were friends, how did she see me? did she see me at all? High school was not one of the high points of my life. I'm sure it is for some people, God help them, and it could have been worse for me, but my positive associations with those four years are confined almost solely to Latin, music, archery (which I did outside of school), and two or three people. If her memories of me were anything like my self-image from that period, I wouldn't have blamed her for smiling brightly and retreating. But she genuinely seemed to be drawing a blank. I am not sure why I feel so strongly that it's foolish of me to be hurt.

There is no moral to this story. I have run out of philosophy and I have a doctor's appointment in six hours. I wonder who I don't remember from high school, and who else doesn't remember me. I wonder if I should be remembered.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I am sorry your friend forgot you. I would not.

Maybe she has a form of prosopagnosia?

Nine

How very odd. Certainly, from the level of acquaintance you describe, I would expect her to remember you. I'm not sure whether, with your memories, I would have described her as a friend - it's a slippery little word - but certainly as someone who was there during certain shared experiences. You wouldn't easily forget that trip to Europe.

And she did guess that it was a high school connection. Nah, the problem's hers, not yours.

Some people have almost no memory. It is as if it all runs out. They won't remember people, they won't remember conversations and they'll only have the most hazy memories of trips and places. I have known people forget their old houses, the names of their pets, the habits of their parents when they were teenagers.

This is why they take endless photographs, because they can look at the pictures and get back something, a flicker of recall -- formal photographs year by year of their children, who otherwise will seem to have always been the age they are, hundreds of snapshots of holidays which will otherwise recede into mist, and endless pictures of their weddings, on conspicuous display so they will not wake up one morning looking at a stranger and wonder who on earth they came home with.

I have a friend who has forgotten, literally forgotten, not pretending, agony that happened to him that I just observed but will never forget. Once in Greece I discovered that he had forgotten everything from courses that we took together only three years before. He has a well-paid job, a life, a child, an old degree in classics, but can not recall who Clytemnestra was, who broke his heart in college, nor why I am his friend -- how we met, what I know about him, why it matters.

There are a lot of people like that. They frighten me.

I am one of those sad creatures with an awful memory. Not as bad as your friend's, but pretty bad: dim intimations in a sea of fog. Do you remember Le Guin's story, "The Diary of the Rose"? That hurt: I felt condemned as something Epsilon. I take those photographs, you bet; I read to have other people's vivid memories; I write to create them for others.

So yes, I'm afraid I do forget people, though never my nearest friends (I hope); I am often startled when they remember me. At cons, I figure they know me by the blue and green, the hats. Outside of that, I'm puzzled.

I would rather be forgotten than forget.

Nine

That's a very disconcerting experience, but yes: I've realized that many times the people who've been important in my life have not considered me particularly important in theirs, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't remember me with the intensity that I remember them. On the other hand, there may be other situations where the reverse is true.

Also--and sort of goes along with what

papersky says--you strike me as a person who lives life richly and fully. You take more from life than some people do. You remember skylines, flowers, books, moods, thoughts. That's a rich life. She certainly liked you and valued you at the time in her own way, and you took a lot from the little she gave. You're the lucky one here: a casual friend whom you never saw out of school enriched your life with memories you still carry.

I'm sorry to hear it. The experience isn't a slur on you, though. Speaking for myself, I have an odd memory which holds onto some things for decades and immediately loses others; I hope I don't do that to someone myself someday. In any event, I think you're memorable.

^and This.

This is sad.
There are also (a few) people who are not superficial photographers of conspicuous display but who have difficulty remembering individuals except by long chains of anecdote recited to them by, well, in this case by me; visuals don't help much. One of my best friends from high school is like this. We went to our ten-year reunion together, where by the end of the evening I had summoned up nearly everyone's name, including those who weren't there (there was a photo montage from our yearbooks on a video screen), which was particularly useful for when my friend would mutter, "Remind me who this is?" But in e-mail, afterwards, she was able to make more connections of her own once my memories had started her off.

This is not to say that I think your experience would've been more pleasant on balance had you recited anecdote, incidentally, because the social contexts of reminding seem rather different!

(My graduating class was 450ish, of which maybe a quarter made it to the reunion. All the women looked recognizable, to me at least, and often more attractive. Many of the men looked oddly distorted.)

I wonder if I should be remembered.

Yes.

^This.

Also: yes.

I was going to give a milder version of what

papersky said. My friends have told me often that I have an extraordinary episodic (autobiographical) memory and even I am impressed by how much detail you recall from ten years ago. So the problem is not just that this person may have a weak episodic memory like the one Papersky describes, but that you are unaware of what an average episodic memory is like.

Also, it is the nature of memory that entire vaults of it may exist, dormant, yet remain temporarily inaccessible because the link to the cluster of memories is not activated. Had you said "we were in chorus together, we hung out on the trip to Europe," that may have opened the floodgates (except by your standards, what would have emerged would probably have been a mere robust stream). If not, then the beginning of one of the anecdotes may have done the trick. And if not, you must always remember that the problem is the other person's memory rather than you own memorability.

What Eric says is another thing I wanted to add: sometimes a name alone doesn't do it, but yeah, when you say something about the trip to Europe, suddenly your familiar face connects up to the face of that friend who had given you the flowers that time.

Yes, this: for example, I have good short-term memory and excellent long-term memory, but in the meantime there is a little man with a library cart who has to file things in the correct place, and if he is backlogged or on a tea break, I simply don't remember it.

Agreeing with what other people have said above: it's not you, it's other people's memory. I have a very good one myself, in some ways (perfect recollection, but some things snipped out, elided in self-defense), so I know a good memory when I see it, and yours is better than mine. You've the sort of memory that doesn't often come in nowadays, the kind that people use for epic poetry. I have found to my sorrow over the years that there are people who simply do not remember even the things one would think necessary to conduct a human life.

And there are also people who have a perfectly reasonable memory that only connects to one sense, a tactile or auditory or olfactory thing.

And there are people whose memories function like lock-boxes, all inaccessible until one trigger is tripped, and then the whole thing spilling out everywhere, and the trigger could be almost anything.

So: not you. Not your fault.

You are well worth remembering.

I'm so sorry. And I don't think it's foolish of you to be hurt, only human.

You're a very memorable person, and most deserving of being remembered. Perhaps anecdotes would have jogged her memory. Perhaps it was only some neurosis of her own.

There's hardly a thing in all the worlds of which I can speak with any surety, but this I can say with certainty: it can't have been in any way because of you, it reflects not a whit on yourself, and it's neither your fault that it happened nor that it grieves you.

You know, this happens to me often. I'll remember little details- things people found insignificant, but that in my opinion made an event or person unique, made them stand out, and became sometimes more reliable and familiar than actual faces. I also felt that I mattered less to people than they did to me. But it isn't fair- in your case, you are a storyteller and your memory is part of your gift. It's all in how you look and how you see: sometimes, while people are interested in a painting's title and date you notice the brush strokes, the colors, and the lighting- not just in the painting, but in the room...and so forth. I understand it like this: your gazes have been different throughout life.

That sounds both bizarre and unpleasant. For what it's worth, you don't strike me as the sort of person who is easy to forget.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Like a mirror on a wall

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