Memoir or Autobiography? Serial Musings on the Fiction of Memory
Written by MFA@ CIIS candidate Guy Slater
Part Four: Mother is a House Fire
As I alluded to in the second part of this essay, the science of memory might be worth considering as a writer of autobiographical work. I read an article recently that describes different kinds of memories and how they are stored. The kind that knows how to tie a shoe (implicit), for example, is stored in a different part of the brain than our long-term, autobiographical memories (explicit). Implicit is something not easily expressed in language, so even though we know how we tie the shoe, it’s harder to explain how exactly. The basal ganglia is where these somatic patterns live, along with the pathological strains of obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction. Interesting bedfellows. Explicit (declarative) memories are long term, but are processed in multiple stages in different parts of the brain. Long-lasting memories are equal parts emotion (hippocampus) and higher order functions (cerebral cortex). The process of encoding these long-term autobiographical memories are susceptible to all kinds of potential glitches along the way. And if the hippocampus is severely damaged, for instance, the result is amnesia. Another study suggests that no memories stick at all until after the age of two and a half or so, and even the earliest memories we would swear our life on as true are so easily borrowed and misdirected by later information as to become nothing more than useful (and sometimes not so useful) fictions.
In any case, current neuroscience theorizes that our brain is in many ways the substance of what we are: our personality, our predilections, our quirks and our disfunction. We would not, according to neuroscience, be “us” without it. Now, this may be so, but it is also helpful to remember that science is essentially an expression of models that aid human understanding of complex phenomena and models shouldn’t be confused with the phenomena themselves, as many scientists will acknowledge. Mapping where in the brain a process so integral to our living experience occurs biochemically doesn’t particularly satisfy the mysterious feeling many of us have that it’s not just a matter of the ol’ noodle but something else. What, for instance, is the feeling many of us have that we have a soul? Or maybe not that term exactly but in that “a rose is a rose by any other name” sense. Maybe it’s just stubborn romanticism to believe it ain’t just brains, but what good is love or epiphany with that explanation? What good is our capacity for metaphoric thinking and language? And what of imagination, enlightenment, story-telling or poetry? Is all that just grey matter?
I bring all this up because, as I said at the outset (part 1), my mother, as integral to my being as anything, may just be an idea. My love for her, my hatred of her, my confusion and ambivalence are all ways that I experience her, especially in her long late absence from my life. She is a specter of memory swirling around in the chaos of time ungoverned by clocks and seasons and rites and rituals. She is the poetry of my soul no matter how I cast the story of her.
I recently had the great privilege to lead an MFA presentation that helps me illustrate the thing I’m struggling in this essay to get across. As an experiment, I had my two participants view a scene I created and then asked them to write about what they experienced. The scene was not a theatrical performance or an artistic exposition or a symbolically charged mandala or anything very interesting at all. It was just a few silent minutes in the corner of a room. The Zoom camera focused on an ordinary corner with nothing particularly notable in it but a small, wooden end table. After a few minutes of this “event,” I had both of my participants write for several minutes about it as either a “non-fictional” experience or a “fictional” one. Both renderings were surprisingly full of life and details and deep inquiry and paradox. It was amazing! We talked about how could this be. How could an ostensibly “nothing” event produce such richness of human expression? And further, we mostly agreed that the division between the fictional and non-fictional versions were quite blurry at best. It seemed that each writer brought their own version of the universe to a quiet corner with an end table, genre structures notwithstanding. The so called “object(s)” did not inform each of the so called “subjects” so much as the object(s) were part of the subject to begin with, objectivity seeming quite illusory in this experiment. I had framed that discovery as our experience of the Tao (Te Ching), the mother void from which everything is given form and purpose. Maybe that is the inexplicable feeling we walk through the world with, a contrast of nothing and everything swirling around in us every moment from the cradle to the grave.
My personal mother void is just that. Though I raised my children without her physical presence, she was in me all the while, in every choice good and bad, every lesson well constructed or not. Strokes of insight and imagination that she instilled in me as a young child survive, though the biochemistry may be untraceable. This is where life and art become the same thing– where the colors get pushed around with the most vibrancy onto the canvas. I was creating it everyday with my children, and it was so spontaneous, so immediate, as we played together in those formative years. I was sometimes aware that we were making their proto-memories together in this rarified zone of life experience that prefigures truly cohesive memory streaming, each developing mind rendering a completely unique map of those shared events in much the same way we each render and interpret works of art. All of our uniquely primal joys, fears, discoveries, disappointments and expectations are created in those early years, and it made me wonder how my mother played with me when I was little. What had she filled me with? What had she grafted onto me despite our differing DNA? Had I learned to love so completely from her without knowing it? And would the bad stuff that came later, the conscious experiences that got encoded in my brain and soul, just be extra layers of construction on the foundation? Maybe I was able to survive the disintegration of her because of what she bestowed in the beginning.
After nearly two decades of raising children in the home we built, our house burned to the ground. El Diablo winds from the Mayacamas aroused a firestorm that torched through our region of Sonoma County like a biblical blowtorch, wiping out nearly everything in its path, melting engine blocks, exploding trees, and reducing homes to dust. But for the standing chimney, our home had been vaporized, the foundation all that was left. We escaped with our lives and a few belongings, but our home, our sense of place and security, disappeared in the space of a few hours. Yet there was something strangely relieving for me about the idea of starting over. It hit me right away and coursed aberrantly through my body. I shared this feeling in the hours and days following the event and it was not fully understood, especially by others who’d just lost all their earthly possessions themselves. I mean, how could it be understood? Nevertheless, I tried to emphasize that it was just lost stuff and that the most precious valuables of all, my partner and children, had survived.
Okay, fine, sure. Just stuff. But maybe it was too soon to have this epiphany. At my core, in my soul perhaps, the traumatic dissonance between sudden loss and the sharp relief of abundance felt perfectly natural. It fit the grand pattern of life and loss I had come to see as inevitable, capricious as it is. Perhaps it was a lifelong habituation of retreating into calmness in the face of calamity that filled the yawning gap of the moment, but it allowed a space for new insights to take shape. It was the curtain pulled back. It revealed that suffering is both relative and absolute. It was the discernment that nothing truly separates any of us. It was, among a great many other things, a brand new understanding of my mother’s life in the van.
One detail of the morning after the fire sticks out. The woman was young, in her early twenties maybe. On her otherwise delicate frame, the mound of impending life pushed out over her apron. Our waitress, having somehow survived the nightmare herself, dutifully reported to work the next morning though she was ready to pop any minute. She smiled generously and asked how we were handling it all and we learned a little about one another. She brought us our food and told us there was no charge. It was the most luxurious stack of pancakes we’d ever eaten. At some point, I looked around for the first time since we came into the café. The place was filled with bleary-eyed survivors, some of whom didn’t know yet if their homes were still standing, just a small number of thousands of folks who had been evacuated and would not be allowed back to confirm their loss until the massive, wildfire complex was contained. But despite the shock and fear that permeated the air, she treated us with extra kindness and attentiveness. And though her own home might be gone, she served others in that desperate hour, and not for the pay she probably couldn’t afford to lose but out of a miraculous kind of compassion that some possess in these moments. What moved me most though was that, in spite of everything, her life was about to begin anew with her baby. She stroked her belly as we spoke and I was reminded of the deep connection a mother has with a child, even in utero.
And now as I write these words, it occurs to me to say that maybe difficult memories don’t burst through the sternum like a malevolent alien. Our children burst out of us containing no memories at all. They become memory, and the continuity of the living survives despite the horrors and the blindspots and the lapses and the pure fiction of it all. One woman had given birth to me and another woman had given me life. She’s gone now, but she remains. Mother is the womb. Mother is the heart. She is the small comforts and she is a battleground. She is the house given for me to build and she is the fire that takes it. She is the photos and talismans and dreams turned to ash and all that is born in its place.
Guy Slater is an MFA creative writing student who is working on an autobiographical fiction with the working title, “A Year of Amnesty.” His goal is to complete it by the end of the program.
