Memory

April 13, 2016

I have this memory. I’m in my great-grandmother’s bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Southridge, Texas. The house is big, “ranch-style,” with white vinyl siding. It has a long, wide backyard, and my great-grandmother’s room—her name is Edie—looks out onto the backyard and the detached garage, which was also behind the house. At the time, she was in her mid-nineties, probably, and I was in first grade, maybe a little bit older. I was standing in the middle of her room, which was small, or at least I remember it being small.

This is—it’s really the only memory I have of that room. Growing up, I’ve collected many memories of the rest of the house, from the front door, to the basement, about which I once had terrible nightmares; to the attic, which was converted to a bedroom. I would spend a lot of time up there, playing video games, flipping through my aunt’s old electronics and engineering textbooks, marveling at the inscrutable diagrams. But my great-grandmother’s room—I never spent a lot of time in there. I peered in a lot—it was right next to the second-floor bathroom—but I rarely passed through the door. In this memory, though, I’ve crossed the threshold to her room. I’m not exactly sure why. Inside, there’s a small bed, a chair, lace curtains (I think), and a dresser. On the dresser is her jewelry, which is hazy. A background detail. It looks like it might have been laid out carefully, which I guess makes sense. She was German.

Sunlight forces its way through the dimmer shades on the windows. The top drawer of the dresser is open, and I’ve pulled something out of it. A small glass vial, filled with tiny granules. This is the second clearest part of the memory: the vial itself, the granules inside. They’re blue—or, maybe the glass of the vial is blue. And very old. The glass of the vial is very old, and rough. I can tell that it’s not a new thing. Eventually, in this memory, my grandmother Katherine—Kathy—comes to get me from the room. I have to put the vial down because “it’s smelling salts.” But before she does, I turn the vial, or I shake it—I’m not sure—and this is the clearest part of the memory: the sound. The gentle clink of these granules, inside this old vial, which I’ve extracted from the top drawer of my great-grandmother’s dresser.

Clarity and accuracy are two different things. To say the sound of the smelling salts in their container is clear to me, now, says nothing about it in the room, then. Now, the sound is light, and crisp. It pairs well with the tactile sensation of the vial’s contents shifting in my hands. But I can’t say this is what it sounded like as it happened. Constantly passing over this memory has made it smooth, like stones in a riverbed.

———

Echoic memory is what we call the medium that allows you to distinguish words and sentences from other things auditory. It’s part of our larger mental network of Sensory memory, of information about things in the world and how we relate to them. Echoic memory is small. It’s short. At its longer end, echoic memories can range on the order of a second, maybe two. Echoic memory holds onto “supercalifragilistic,” while I’m still working my way through “expialidocious,” and three seconds after I start talking, the meaning of my words has made it to your brain, but the memory of the sounds themselves has mostly dissipated. Past the fourth second, how do we remember sounds? Most of us don’t, and they are simply discarded. I suspect that at least part of the reason for this is purely practical. We are constantly bathed in sound, immersed in the auditory imprint of a particular moment, and we need to forget some of these sounds so that we can tell the signal from the noise. Professional musicians and translators, I am told, have a knack for this. It’s part of the training, I suppose. They have slightly better, longer, more well-practiced faculties for echoic memory. But for most others of us, the meaningful things we see, or touch, or smell—we all know that one: a scent snapping you back to some long unconsidered time and place—inputs to these other senses are likely exponentially more remembered than things heard. Sounds are nearly always forgotten. They quickly fade, as echoes do.

Sound is constant, consistent, and it can test the edges of our patience, both somehow for blandness and for repetition, at different times. How many times have you thought to yourself, “How long has this sound been in the background before I noticed it?” Certain sounds, or alternatively their absence, can situate us temporally, giving us a sense of our passage through time. But sounds can also create time, evoking their own kind of passage: a signal, a rhythm not tied to our particular moment. I also remember, or I think I remember—who knows; stones in a riverbed—the sound of the garage door opening in the house where I grew up. I went to public school in the suburbs of Denton until I was maybe twelve or ten. I would go to my grandmother’s house after school, where she would make sandwiches and, apparently, I would sometimes look through my great-grandmother’s things. But after that practice ended I would go home, if I wasn’t at the library or in a theatre society or lit mag meeting. I’d watch MTV and play computer games. I have distinct memories of orange juice and hostess ding dongs, watching Jamiroquai’s music video for “Virtual Insanity” as often as it was aired, trying to figure out how they did it. I still don’t really know. I mean, I can guess how the floor moves, but the chairs. Sometimes one chair moves but the other doesn’t, and the couch rotates—it—I just, I never got it. Anyways. I have memories of playing Hitman and Half Life, sometimes Counterstrike. And the rumbling of the garage door meant that it was the end of this unsupervised, unstructured time, since my mother, or father, had come home from work.

The sound was an automated roar. A buzzing, whirring groan. Dim, because my room was a couple floors above garage-level, but not quiet. The house would shake, slightly, from the vibrations of the motor. My parent’s called ours “The House that Dave built” as a joke about Dave, the contractor who oversaw its construction in the late-eighties, and all the shortcuts he took. Missing insulation here, crossed pipes there. Every time the garage door would open and the house would shake I’d think, “The house that Dave built.” I remember, when she was still alive, my childhood dog Cleo would run to the door at the top of the stairs leading down to the garage when she heard the rumbling door opening. She was big—a Boxer—and very excitable, and she would get particularly upset when someone would leave the house, so much so that there were strategies for closing the door whenever Cleo was aware of your imminent departure. She got very excited when anyone returned, and the garage door signaled return.

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Echoic memory may be short, but it is also long. It can function as a kind of triage room, a holding tank in which unclear or impactful sounds are stored, holding out for some uncertain future event in which later sounds are heard that will help make sense of things. In this sense, echoic memories can anchor us to a particular feeling of being in the world that has long since passed. Without them, we often feel lost. In special anechoic isolation chambers, most subjects report experiencing subjective buzzing or whistling sounds. We lose ourselves when we are truly alone. Sounds may help locate us, bring us back to something within us in which we find meaning, but it can also disrupt this sense of self. Distance, echoes, reverberations. Replay a memory of a sound enough times and the hard edges begin to fade, characters change and soften. Vivid details are denatured as the moment passes, moving ever further away from when they first caught your ear.

Episodic memory is the memory of an experience, of a time and a place, subjectively held. That hike up the mountain when you were seven; walking through the cranberry bog when you were thirteen; last week at the bar when that guy tried to pick a fight with the bouncer. Semantic memory is the knowledge we build about the world, often through experiences which can become episodic memories. Semantic memory deals with mountains—episodic memory, that one mountain. Semantic memory—facts about cranberry bogs and walking through them. Episodic memory—that one day on vacation in Hyannis, in the bog, on the way to the candy shop. Semantic memory is that the loud, whirring, buzzing sound means someone is home. Episodic memory is that time dad came home with KFC. Episodic and semantic memory are intimately linked. They are mutually dependent, and both heavily dependent on one’s culture—there are, after all, things we consider worth locking away. Culturally, we tend to emphasize the visual, so it makes sense that our memories do the same. Episodic and semantic memory are also deeply embodied. There’s clinical support for the claim that we construct more semantic memory when we are well, when our lives are stable and uninteresting, but more episodic memory when we are ill, when there is trauma or upheaval. Which is cruel. And is why I can revisit maybe a shred of pleasant memory—one snippet of one afternoon on the beach with my family as a kid, freeze frames from one or two discussions when I was in university, or the first five somehow impossible but somehow carefree years when I lived alone in New York—but in vivid detail, I can revisit my aunt Phyllis in the hospital. The machines beeping and whirring. Her labored breathing, and my family talking in the corner about all the things that you talk about when the last thing you want to talk about is really the only thing that anyone wants to talk about.

And I can recall in smooth, polished, over-produced detail the crunching sound of the first car crash I was ever in. My girlfriend and I, who were fine, as was the other driver. Shouting. Heavy breathing. My infernal satisfaction at the metallic smashing sound when it happened. The tinny pop and drag of the two hoods striking, like when you crush an empty can of cream soda. Trying later to forget this sound and the attendant pleasure it elicited. Knowing, somehow, that I never would. The twinkling of glass shards from the windshield as they flew about our cabin and fell to the ground after the accident. That sound—the brilliance of it—

—it was familiar. I couldn’t quite figure out why, or how. How it brought back the sound of the granules in the vial in my great-grandmothers bedroom. How I’d heard it twinkle not after I turned the vial in my hand, but before. How the glassy blue granules shone and clinked around in the vial even when I held it still in my small hands, transfixed by the contents. How I could not at first detect the source of the twinkling as I examined the vial, only to discover that the granules were moving about on their own. How it wasn’t “smelling salts.” How the memory just stops there—no more. Fading, scattered slides like at the end of a movie reel. A projector ending effect. How I need to know what happened after. How I want to remember—

—Great-grandma. She died. I saw it happen.

No I didn’t. I just saw her lying on the bed and I knew. I knew because I heard it. Heard her not moving. So, I heard nothing?—no. I heard the vial. Light and crisp. Called for grandma. Kathy. The house was quiet after they took her to the hospital. She died that day I looked at the vial. Brought it out of her top drawer after they left. I was alone. I heard the granules. Had to have been them. Why else would I remember the sound so clearly?

———

It is said that we accumulate painful memories and experiences like carvings on the bark of a sapling: these scars do not disappear as we move on, though they may fade from view at times. Instead they remain with us, in some way, over time. They tend to stay put, too, based on the way trees grow. Never moving too far away from where they initially occurred, the marks of our past tend to stay right where they began. They may grow darker, more disfigured, or they may hardly change at all. They won’t grow in size, however. No matter how deeply they cut when they were first made, painful memories, like arborglyphs, won’t get bigger. But you can. The wounds won’t get smaller, but you can make them a smaller part of who you are.

Nevertheless, our pain persists and, like some sounds, it is always ready to be stirred to the surface, recollections caught by some stimulus from the ether. But this is a trap we set for ourselves, an unfortunate condition of our craving for generality. The scars of regret and pain may not grow with us, but we are nonetheless compelled to return to the moments of their birth, looking for meaning simply because we hope to find it there. At the place where it happened. In my great-grandmother’s room. The scene of the crime. Or, perhaps in events that took place thereafter. We want our pain to mean something. Echoic memory surely plays a part in this process of remembering, of not being able to forget. Your short term recollection of sounds cements additional content or meaning in your memory. It’s how jingles work: emotions, information, associations. But in recalling it to themselves later, rarely will people remember the sounds they heard. Sound is the message, but it’s not the meaning. Instead, it’s the inner voice. It mimics or repeats what they heard or remember. It’s a partial explanation for why listening to something stuck in your head is so satisfying. Though it’s stuck “in your head,” you’re not listening to it. You’re always recreating it in your voice, mentally. Externalization is like scratching an itch. So then what are you remembering, if not sounds? What are sounds? The tree falling in the woods and my dog Sam both make but are not their sounds in the way a red pen is red or a book is paper. And the sounds you hear in your head—whether it’s your inner voice recreating a jingle, some vivid memory of a sound from your past, or even tinnitus—those aren’t made of waves propagating through a medium. So, do they count as sound?

Philosophers of perception have given us two significant takes on this question, describing sound as either properties or event-like individuals. If characterized as properties, sounds can be taken as secondary qualities of objects, a characteristic of a thing received by our sense of hearing, something which doesn’t exist outside of our perception of it. Color is secondary quality in the same way, and some philosophers claim, relatedly, that it’s more correct to say that something “has” a sound, instead of saying that it “makes” one. And, another related concept, which I rather like, is that while sounds might be a property of the objects that have them, it is the dispersive medium—like air, or water—which “reveals” those sounds to us. So, things still make, or, I guess, “have” sounds in a vacuum. Those sounds are just not revealed to us. On the other hand, calling sounds “event-like individuals” means, first, that each sound is an event: it unfolds through time, and at no single moment during that unfolding is it complete, or whole. A sound is more of a process than a thing. And second, it means that sounds, as events, have properties, which can behave or progress independently of their sources. They are individual. They may mix together with other sounds—also individuals—change over time due to environmental conditions, but they exist as individual processes, which we can mentally differentiate. Think about the Doppler Effect. As an ambulance sounds its siren while driving past a listener, we perceive the sound of that ambulance as having different characteristics at different times, but it’s always the same sound, and it’s acting independently of the ambulance, which doesn’t get bigger or smaller or lower or higher as the sound does. It remains the same ambulance, like the scars on the bark of a sapling.

Disorders of sound perception continue to defy explanations in medical literature. Hyperacusis, phonophobia, misophonia. All are psychological conditions characterized by an increased sensitivity to sound, often to such a degree that certain frequencies can elicit severe pain responses in those affected. None has been widely accepted as real. Sound is like pain—a private experience, located wherever those experiencing it happen to be. But pain is a bodily sensation, at least according to western medicine, and we don’t tend to appreciate sound that way, in sensory terms. It may trigger or pair with sensations, but sound as sensation itself? The community is not satisfied. “We demand more robust data and statistically significant results.” Still, as unlikely as the case might be, we are left with the fact that trying to remember sound is a lot like trying to remember pain: we can only really get part of the way there, before our            faculties start to fail us. I grew up listening to the music of women who knew intimately the connection between pain and sound. In her song “Experiment IV,” Kate Bush tells a story about a classified military project to develop “a sound that could kill someone.” At its core, this sound would be a wounding force, a weapon. “From the painful cries of mothers to the terrifying scream / We recorded it and put it into our machine.” From pain to sound to pain. Jericho’s biblical walls crumbled at the sound of the Israelites’ trumpets after a long and painful war. Their sound was more than a trigger. It was a force, a sensation in itself. Experiment IV captures the lethal force of sound, but there’s more here: the fatal music first invites you in with a siren song before dashing you against the rocks. “It could feel like falling in love / It could feel so bad / But it could feel so good.”

To revisit a compelling sound or call forth a memory is in one sense to objectify, to celebrate, but it is also to synthesize, to let go of that which is less pleasant, to create anew. Recollection and thinking can be ways of ignoring detail, forgetting difference, abstracting from what’s out there. We hear certain sounds, we relive certain painful experiences, over and over and over again, until they become semantic. Like stones in a riverbed. Not one particular instance of pain, but pain in general. And this is how voice impressionists do it, too. The characteristics of famous voices are part of our semantic memory, so if the characteristics are imitated well, and the qualities are close enough—not too high, deep, fast, slow, smooth, or gruff, depending—the impression works. Impressionists don’t capture the sound of the voice, but reference our always fading echoic memory of it. But now I fear I’ve created a familiar monster, turning the wounded person into a kind of pathetic, tragic character, idealizing their suffering and romanticizing the pain of memory. How do we talk about pain and sound without fetishizing them? Without generalizing what was particular to a time and place?

———

I remember, for a while, after my great-grandmother died, her voice was still the one on the outgoing message on my family’s answering machine. People would call, and leave her messages. They would call to wish her a happy birthday, or just to say hi, the way we might do now on a Facebook profile. The way I have done on a Facebook profile. But they would also call just to listen to her voice. Leaving a message after a missed call always felt compulsory to me. The message left was the follow-through, but not the aim of the action, which was just to hear Edie’s voice again. The recorded voices of the departed become more like music, like a song stuck in your head. You can endlessly recreate it in your own inner voice, but it’s not the sound that you possess. Just some bits of information about it. A reconstruction. Except, in this case, unlike a song, listening to the real thing can be less like scratching an itch, and more like wearing an itchy sweater. The sound is the message but not the meaning, and, for better or worse, it will always be fading, as echoes do.