Trompe L'Oeil

The terminally ill (lung cancer, from smoking) art critic Peter Schjeldahl recently wrote in The New Yorker, "I remember arriving in an Italian village by train after midnight and walking past a cemetery where candles burned at every grave, with no one around. Or I think I remember it."

Acutely aware of the limited time he has left (his doctor's prognosis on his spreading cancer is not optimistic), Schjeldahl's written an intimate and confessional memoir of his life, as filtered through that most  unreliable of witnesses, memory. "We have lousy memories," he observes.  "Memory is a liar. It’s a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions. The stories make cumulative lies—or, give us a break, conjectures—of our lives. This is O.K. because it had darn well better be."

We tell others stories about our life, our childhood, our loves, our careers, and our ambitions, and with time, we remember the stories that we tell more vividly than the actual memories.  But by necessity, those stories have to leave out extraneous - or unflattering - details and, unlike life itself, have to conform to the structure of fiction: character, crisis, climax, conclusion.   

But life doesn't follow the rules for a short story and is in fact one long, continuous experience. Climactic moments might resolve into conclusions, but the real story of our life keeps on continuing past "conclusion" and "resolution," and  the characters and crises overlap in a confusing tapestry of interwoven experiences.  The actual experiences of our lives don't end with fades to black or someone calling "End scene!," but that's the way we replay them in our minds.

This year, I touched base for the first time in nearly four decades with a childhood friend of mine, and we talked about an epic cross-country camping trip which we participated in during the summer of 1969.  It was the first time since the early 70's that I discussed the trip with an actual participant.  I vividly remember watching the first moon landing on a portable black & white t.v. while camping in a Louisiana bayou that year.  But my friend remembers it differently - we were on the high plains of Texas in his version, and he has some detailed chronological evidence to back him up.

I'm convinced that his version is correct and my memory is wrong.  As I consider his evidence, I realize that we weren't in Louisiana until much later that summer when my late July birthday occurred.  Over the years, I've conflated those two events, the moon landing and my birthday, in my memory.  

I've had to abridge the story of the camping trip for impatient listeners, who didn't necessarily want to hear a day-by-day account of a six-week experience.  Over the years, I've told the shortened version, or shortened versions, so many times that I've come to believe my Cliff Notes edition over my own recollection, and my mind has stored the memory of the abridged story in the place of the actual first-hand experience.  

This may sound to you to be unique and disingenuous on my part, or possibly even dishonest, but I propose that the same is true for a great many of my memories and a great deal of yours.  The problem is the memories of the stories we tell ourselves feel exactly the same as memories of the experience - they're indistinguishable - and we've fooled ourselves for most of our lives with our own little fictions.  

We're not necessarily all little liars because we're telling that which we earnestly believe to be true. And it's okay to trust the stories that others tell us, because their edits and the way they construct their stories reveal as much if not more about their character as precise documentation would.  

But we should doubt ourselves. We'd be fools if we mistook our own internal narratives as incontrovertible fact.