Sunday in Memory Lane Extras

Memory is like that. It buries things to resurface when the time is right.

I was studying Chinese philosophy for a long time before I began to tackle Traditional Chinese Medicine. It started so long ago that I struggle to remember what triggered my interest in all things Chinese in the first place.

My grandmother had a small collection of Chinese porcelain which was on a high cabinet I could not reach when I was a tot but I often gazed at it. When I was still pre-school I remember saving pennies to buy a tiny delicate trinket portraying a rickshaw with a beautiful lady being pulled by a running man. Every day I would run ahead of my mother to check that it was still in the shop window. Actually buying it was a highlight of my existence at the time. I loved this trinket so much that one of the first things I drew at school was an image of the lady.

I also had a memory that I would recount to my mother, always asking to ‘go back to the river’. I remembered my mother standing with a very long pole in a shallow, long and narrow boat. She was pushing the boat along close to the shore of a slow moving river overlooked by steep mountains. It was a dark night and I was crying, lying at her feet in the boat. She quietly begged me to be silent but I was in pain…. suddenly there was a flash of fire from above and a very loud crack. That is all there is.

The only explanation for this very odd memory, which did not fit with any moment of my life, was a curious thing. During her pregnancy with me, my mother had been reading a book about the persecution of poor Chinese people by the Japanese in WW2. Is it possible that she had conveyed the tragic imagery to me as a foetus? We thought it certainly was possible. We also thought that I may have been recounting a memory from a previous life. The truth is that between us, we could never be sure.

Many years later I was watching a documentary on television and recognised the scenery. The calm broad water between high sheer cliffs sent a shiver down my spine and the hairs on my arms into an alert. This was the river….

Yangtse River at the Three Gorges

I was amazed that my memory came from a real place! It was exciting to finally identify it. Not that I was any the wiser for it, but it was comforting to know that this place was not just a figment of either my mother’s or my imagination.

I have another memory from that time but this one cannot be attached to a real place because it was an hallucination caused by Scarlet Fever. I felt myself shrinking tinier and tinier until l slipped between the fibres of my cot sheets, through the mattress and, still shrinking, I arrived at a place filled with soft light reflecting from an endless sea of shiny transparent bouncy bubbles. I was a bubble too. I bounced around, spinning and rolling, suspended in space….

So you can imagine my reaction when, twenty years later, my two year old son, Dan, developed mumps and asked me if I could ‘feel the bubbles’ that he could see passing around and through me. I didn’t need a thermometer to know what was happening to his poor overheated brain. Thankfully the fever broke that night and Dan recovered very quickly having acquired a good immunity to whatever mumps actually is….

In our folklore, memories are stored in the brain. Everyone thinks this is true, don’t they? But, from my studies I learned that memories are stored in our flesh and bones and organs. The evidence for the truth of this comes to us via anecdotes from those who have lost limbs or received donated organs. All sorts of bizarre stories have been told about the loss of memory after an amputation or the sudden arrival of new memories with a kidney, liver or heart transplant. People who suddenly lose a lot of weight may experience memory losses too. Shock can stop a memory from appearing until decades later, as if it had been walled up somewhere deep and rarely visited.

Memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks by recording only moments or minutes of an event. Sometimes it makes a mess of chronology and other times it marries together two or more similar events until it becomes a tangled mishmash covering years of our lives. Sometimes I remember stuff purely because I have recounted the story more than once before and so it has become a legend in my repertoire.

My old friends often start a conversation with me by saying, “Do you remember….” and surprisingly often I have to say that I don’t! We each seem to store very different scenarios, even if we are talking about the same event.

I love the way that certain music or smells can trigger a memory so vivid and insistent that it can invoke the emotion we were feeling at the time.

When I was a teenager I loved to bunk my way into the Marquee Club in Soho, London. That was where I first heard Peter Frampton and the Herd performing. They were little more than teenagers themselves at the time, but I relish the memory, the excitement and the joy of hearing this song for the very first time…. ah yeah, that was real live music, real audience participation, wasn’t it?

Catchya in the threads!

ONWARDS!
xx