As a child I used to lie awake at night, half in fascination, half in fear at what the darkness might contain. Light was not just a flick of the switch away: there was no electricity, and the tropical bushland beyond the clearing where our farmhouse stood was impenetrably dark, even by moonlight. But the hours of darkness, which seemed interminable, because there was no clock visible either, were a space to be explored, a space immense enough almost to engulf thought, an ocean of ether through which many intimations, sensations, images and ideas found their way to the small, sagging island of my bed. The hours of darkness became a time of introspection, dramatically and awesomely different from day. I discovered that the consciousness that comes into play by night is of a different order, a different quality, from the consciousness called into being by light of day.
The only signs to mark the passage of the night were the changing colour of the sky and the movement of the stars across the eastern part of it, above the dim mass that marked low, uninhabited coastal hills. The hour before dawn was the sweetest time of night. I learned to sense it, although I could also see the indications by kneeling on my bed to squint through partly-open blue-tinted louvre slats. There was a barely audible hum as the darkness was about to disperse, even before the first bird-cries. Only at the approach of piccaninny daylight would the trees and grasses and insects and birds and animals begin to stir, sensing the fulcrum of energy about to shift on the nycthemeral cycle as the circadian clock responded like a sensor to the change in light's intensity - a transition that was palpable in me as well.
The "morning stars" - Venus, Sirius, Arcturus, depending on the time of year -
would hang dazzling above the hills as the aqua aura of the earth became visible along the horizon, and I would feel suffused by a corresponding inner glow of well-being and harmony and peace - a sense of warmth, despite the drop in atmospheric temperature preceding sunrise. I had survived the night, and at this point it was safe to sleep, although the pristine freshness of the world becoming visible beyond my windows at that time of day often tempted me to sit on the steps outside my room instead, to watch details unfolding into light.
* * *
When I was barely twenty years old, I gave birth to a child of my own. Four nights and days spent in a coma are missing from my remembered life, and when I initially regained consciousness, there was a great deal more I could not account for - months and years, and most of my precarious sense of identity, as I had sustained brain damage as a result of the eclampsia of pregnancy that had precipitated this melodramatic state of affairs. Before entering the hospital, and unaware that I was in any danger, I had had a premonition that I would not be leaving that place alive. The premonition almost came to pass.
My infant daughter and I were both anointed in the waters of the Styx, as it were, in the middle of the night, by a priest summoned to the hospital - she to receive a name by which she might be known to God, I to receive the last rites. In spite of this, or it may even be because of it, we both survived. Of course, I know of these events only at second hand, not having been conscious at the time of their occurrence. I could not even imagine what I might have been experiencing during the four days and nights of coma. It sounds trite, but it really was almost as if I had died and then returned to life, though this is no doubt partly an illusion caused by memory loss. So since then there has always been a chasm, not wide but deep - a fracture or fault line that interrupts the illusion of continuous and accessible memory, that which supports one's sense of identity and seems indispensible to the consciousness of self.
I cannot imagine, either, how this traumatic experience affected my daughter, born more than two months premature, but the impact on her psyche and vulnerable consciousness must have been devastating. If it were possible for a psychopomp or spiritual guide to take each of us by the hand and lead us back through that labyrinth in such a way that we had subsequent and full recall of the experience, would it dispel deep, unarticulated traumas or generate even greater ones? Somewhere in our subliminal selves lies the imprint of that long, lonely night.
What I did remember some time later was the approach to the black tunnel of nothingness that the experience became for me. I remembered crawling on my hands and knees in the middle of the night to the door of the ward in a rural hospital that was connected to the rest of the rambling wooden structure by a long corridor. As I was the only patient in the maternity section, I was isolated from all human contact. I remember realising I would not be able to go to fetch help myself, and then there is a void in memory until I regained consciousness four days later.
* * *
There were some subtle changes in my personality after I finally emerged from the shadow of the tunnel, a process which took many months, and perhaps years. Certain pre-existing tendencies seemed to be accentuated as a result of what had occurred, whether for physiological, psychological or spiritual reasons, or some combination involving those, I cannot say. I seemed to become more haunted, more attuned to the tragic, but I masked this by assuming a flamboyant social persona. The most intense shifts were in my attitude to time and memory. The perception of time involved, and involves, something of a paradox, though this may be quite commonplace for all I know.
On the one hand, I saw my life foreshortened, lending a desperate urgency to experience, a thirst to explore and discover the meaning of existence through love, travel, art, learning, as part of an underlying attempt to attain some understanding of the human spirit. This was accompanied by an intensifying awareness of the need for awareness, and a heightened sense of the value of all experience. Probably these movements of the psyche would have occurred anyway, but I believe my experience in the hospital accelerated my desire for them to happen, and sharpened the edges of my perception. Sometimes - too often - this produced a painful subjectivity, rather than clarity.
On the other hand, simultaneously with this sometimes feverish sense of urgency came a contradictory sense that time was unlimited and fathomless, that I could live many lives in one chronological lifetime, span many incarnations, reinvent myself to some extent. This contradiction has never resolved itself, nor have I ever really attempted to bring it to resolution. In any case that will happen soon enough, in the natural course and order of things.
It is to the experience of a time without memory - a kind of personal void - that I also attribute my almost pathological fascination with the nature of memory. For me, as presumably for many, if not most, the primary language of memory is imagery, impressions given form by all the primary senses and their permutations and combinations, such as synaesthesia. But to me such imagery is also the language of time. Upsetting the balance of any neat equation one might be tempted to construct is the tension engendered by the synchronic nature of memory subverting the intractable grid we attempt to impose on time. It is true that memory can be persuaded to function in a diachronic way, and there are moments of synchrony with clock-constructed time as well, a rapprochement between the two systems of ordering experience, one generated from within, the other imposed largely from without.
But there is also the other sensation, the effect of the metaphysical tectonic plates of time and memory rubbing against each other in inchoate, shadowy reaches of the mind, inflicting a kind of psychic pain. Because memory is not subject to time as we interpret it, and nor is the converse true. They are both aspects of some vaster system, cogs within a cosmic wheel: memory mysterious as nebulae where stars are born, and time, released from earthly gravity, a conjectural dimension we must simplify to comprehend.
Memory can open wormholes through personal time, giving access to events and places that only the individual can travel to. Memory in this sense can function as a time machine, a sputnik, a spacecraft that navigates the time-traveller's mind.A secret sense, that can be a resource for both factual purposes (remembering procedures, for instance) as well as subjective ones, in which context it is indispensible to the integration of experience into a coherent form, and unique to each individual. If there is a collective unconscious, as Jung believed, and therefore such a phenomenon as species memory, somehow encoded and passed on, then the implications for the vital role of memory also as a shared resource are staggering. The migratory patterns of many species, the awesome annual journeys of Arctic terns and many other birds, are presumably linked to such a species-specific internalised database.
But while memory may be said to exist in various guises in both animate and inanimate categories of the natural world - one thinks of geological "memory", and the data stored in ice plugs collected in Antarctica, as well as such familiar examples as the growth rings of a tree - it is with the nature of human memory, and access to it, that I am preoccupied in the present context.
To what extent, then, can time and memory ever be contiguous, covalent, coterminous? Four days and nights of remembered life may sometimes hold very little significance, and yet when one is denied access to four days and nights of one's life, they can suddenly assume a significance out of all proportion to their actual duration. In the present case, I know them to have been of more than passing significance. My daughter was born, we both almost died - occasions one would wish to be present at, however harrowing the latter may have been.
Memory determines and helps to define a culture and its subsets: not only the culture of family, but that of a given family, and similarly for friendship, love, and most human functions and faculties, at least those involving an element of consciousness. Language itself, which forms the currency, the life-blood of a culture, is a function of memory. Like language and like living cells, memory continually reinvents itself, uniquely in each individual. Memory also embodies certain subjectivities and idiosyncracies that cannot be cloned.
What are we, without memory? This question has been asked many times, and no doubt answered adequately, and far more fully than I am equipped to attempt. But it seems that when memory begins to fail at the cellular level, so that cells no longer "remember" their own blueprint for the purposes of replacement and repair - regeneration - this deterioration of cellular "memory" results in the degenerative effects of ageing. By the same token, the genetic legacy we pass on is a biological memory of all who have preceded us. My daughter in this sense embodies a memory of me and of many others. But this is memory in a form to which the consciousness has no direct key.
Boris Pasternak's novel, "Doctor Zhivago", contains the following meditation on memory, embedded in a discourse on the nature of death and resurrection that Zhivago delivers to the ailing Anna Ivanovna:
"...what is consciousness? Let's see. To try to consciously go to sleep is a sure way to have insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a beam of light directed outwards, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't trip up...
"So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else's. Well, what are you? That's the crux of the matter. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? - No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity - in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now look. You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life. - Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."
The mother of one of my friends in Greece was suffering from Alzheimer's syndrome for many years. He provided full-time, loving care for her at home, in a physically beautiful environment. She was always well dressed and her carers applied make-up, gave her regular manicures and massages, gentle exercise and social stimulation, but the glassiness of her gaze, the rigidity of her expression, her failure to respond with even so much as a flicker of recognition or interest to any stimuli were chilling to behold, as was her unbroken silence.
Language is a perceptible form and function of memory, without which there can be no language, as witnessed by the pitiable case of Kaspar Hauser. A person who has no language cannot communicate the kinds of factual information most people regard as proof of identity.
Is there any residual memory for people in such conditions as Alzheimer's syndrome? In Eleni's case, there appeared not to be, not even little lapses into recollection, and with the loss of the power of recall, conscious or involuntary, was lost her key to animation, vitality, personality. There was not even a trace remaining of the scaffolding of habitual behaviour. The spirit appeared to have fled or become completely immobilised, trapped in a state of total paralysis. It was as if she had been given an overdose of some bizarre variety of botox that effaced not only the superficial signs of ageing, but also the signs of having lived - of experience remembered.
In the case of Alzheimer's syndrome, however, appearances do not correspond neatly to the neurological reality, which is no less frightening for that. It seems that it is not memory itself that is impaired, but access to it. The part of the brain whose function it is to retrieve memory is the part affected by Alzheimer's. For the person afflicted, it probably amounts to the same thing. Recent research in the United States has found that, since memory is indeed iconic, the use of images in art galleries, particularly well-known and well-loved paintings, can unblock channels of recall in some Alzheimer's patients, and release chains of associations connected with a particular image.
I had known Eleni, my Greek friend's mother, before the onset of the trauma, and while she had always maintained a distant manner towards those outside her immediate circle, her aphorisms were legendary, reflecting great presence of mind and strength of character. She had lived a rich life and seen many lands, although her childhood had been marked by tragedy, when her family, who were Greek, were forced out of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, in the conflagration of 1922. Her mother had died in childbirth on the quays of Piraeus, among swarms of unwanted refugees afflicted by cholera and typhoid, amid those demented with grief and traumatised by what they had fled.
During the Nazi occupation of Greece, she had hidden partisans in her cellar in the heart of Athens, directly across the road from a German machine-gun emplacement. She remembered absolutely nothing of this life. If her son had not preserved these memories for her, and of her, it would have been as if the life had not been lived, as if the events that had shaped its unique, and yet - because of the times and places in which she lived - representative complexion, had never borne this particular flower or fruit.
Is there also such a phenomenon as cultural Alzheimers? Can we afford to lose our cultural memories?
When old people recite their catalogue of memories, even when others tire of the repetitious rosary, they are asserting their continuing connectedness with life.
The experience of my daughter's birth in the presence of both our virtual deaths has, I believe, left a profound impression on me, and on her. I do not like to be completely alone at night, although I appreciate having the solitude to reflect and mull over impressions. So I am grateful for an understanding presence, but I also like to have personal space. I have a phobia about entering tunnels, figuratively speaking - about being swallowed up by blankness.
There is a question I shall never be able to answer. Did some part of my self get left behind when I returned across the void from that other shore? Even if I could make that crossing again, it is unlikely that I would find what I was seeking. But part of the aftermath was a sense of bereavement, of having lost something precious, and the nagging feeling that if only I could remember what happened, I would know what it was that had been lost, or at least why this feeling persisted.
Insomnia is preferable to the shadow of an old trauma. I have a phobia about experiencing things I cannot afterwards remember, not only as a result of the coma, but also on account of the seizures that followed at quite frequent intervals over the next five years, short-circuiting my power of recall and echoing the initial trauma as the aftershocks echo an earthquake, often creating a permanent sense of apprehension in the presence of any reminders of those signs and symptoms. It's like the fear of water, of drowning, that those who've almost drowned are haunted by. I experience some form of this on many nights, approaching sleep, and its effect is to keep me awake, even when I'm tired. It's as if Charon is waiting in the darkness, and I want to see his face, his boat, before entrusting him with my fate.
It is not entirely a matter of coincidence that I am writing this at night. I began it yesterday, at piccaninny daylight, and resumed it when I woke tonight, shortly after midnight: an insomniac writing her way towards a still-distant but compassionate dawn.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that there are two ways to live your life. One way is to live as if nothing is a miracle. The other is to live as if everything is a miracle. My own loss of memory, and the fact that it was gradually restored to me to the point where I am able to write of these things, incline me to the latter view. While there is memory, there can be everything that memory helps to engender: love, faith, courage, hope, belief in the possibility of miracles, and the means of expressing such concepts. Without memory, there is something that is not even darkness. A void, or an interval of dark matter, in which we become as nothing.