Forgetting

I am making it a goal to blog every day from here on out...hopefully I'll be able to stick to it. This entry has been a long time coming, but I just haven't gotten around to writing it all down.

In Ong's chapter "You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas," he says, "Putting experience into any words (which mean transforming it at least a little bit--not the same as falsifying it) can implement its recall." (page 36) This struck a personal chord for me because, for starters, I have always had a terrible memory. I can't remember any specific events from most of my childhood up until I was probably fifteen. Every now and then I'll get fleeting glimpses but I don't have any real recollection of many events early on. I've come up with a few different theories as to why this happened to me. Maybe something traumatic happened to me when I was young that I don't remember, so I've blocked it out, along with everything else. I'm really good at blocking things out and forgetting about them all together. Sometimes my mom will remember a story about when I was younger and I will tell her that I hadn't thought about that for twelve years and probably would have forgotten it forever if she hadn't brought it up. But as I was reading Ong's chapter on recollection, something different occurred to me. Ever since I learned to write when I was four, I have been writing everything down. (I know this because I still have the written things, not because I can remember it--ironic, I know.) Ong says that putting experience into words can implement its recall; maybe I have written so much down on paper that I have written very little down in my memory. Words have always been so important to me--perhaps everything that happened to me has been transformed in my twisted head from experience to word, and therefore forgotten forever.