Memory

"Memory" is the title of the eleventh book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and is best read after the preceding two books, Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance.

In the beginning, Miles Vorkosigan goes into combat while still suffering from the after-effects of being killed and revived in the previous book. As a result, he suffers an epileptic seizure and injures friendly personnel. He tries to conceal this by falsifying his mission report, but he is caught lying by Simon Illyan, head of Imperial Security, and forced to resign from ImpSec.

Soon afterwards, Illyan's implanted memory chip which gives him a photographic memory begins malfunctioning, and Miles suspects that a plot to destroy Illyan's career and subvert ImpSec is in the making. His attempts to investigate this are blocked by Illyan's deputy, who appears to suspect him of the crime, so he asks Emperor Gregor Vorbarra to assign an Imperial Auditor to the case to give him the necessary authority. Gregor instead decides to give Miles himself a temporary Auditor's appointment; after Miles successfully resolves the crisis, this is made permanent.

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

- W.B. Yeats, 1919.

previous | The Wild Swans at Coole | next

From Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber

This, the main Torch Song from the musical Cats, is the only number in the show that doesn't take its lyric from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

The lyric is, at least primarily, composed by Eliot, but it comes instead from Prufrock and Other Observations a 1917 collection aimed at an adult audience, where the OPBoPC targeted children. Given the erudition and obscurity of Eliot's adult poetry, it's not surprising that whereas the other songs in the show are simply the poem set to music, there are some significant changes - all simplifications- between this and its source poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night.

One must be fair, the changes are somewhat necessary:

TWELVE o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

I have been unable to find any attribution for who did the adaptation, unless it was Andrew Lloyd Webber himself - this seems unlikely, given the fact that he has never been known as a lyricist, though not impossible - I would personally be inclined to speculate they are the work of Don Black who was most closely associated with working with Lloyd Webber (collaborating with him on the show Song and Dance which was concurrent with Cats), although given his personal relationship with Elaine Paige, who was to play the lead and sing the song, it's possible that Tim Rice did the job.

Whoever penned the words, Memory became the best known, and most recorded track from the libretto, with the essential performance probably being that of Barbra Streisand, rather than either Paige or the other long-running female lead, Marti Webb.

memory (november 30, 2000)

my brain hit the re-Cord
  button one day,  i looked
 at him, forgetting his name
      and uttered,

  "  sam?  "   --  --

odd, since i've a picture of
    him a--or, i'd a picture
 of him at my kindergarten
birthday party --- ... but i
was at the time in, what, fourth
or third grade? . . .

      ~

   later i was influenced or made
   to  ..;,    .. well i decided
to challenge time by going in
   a--confuse time--circle and repeating
the same actions ... odd
thing to do at .. 10? 9?

   and so i circled the campus
feeling smart and there was mike
  and mister munzer  . . but
mostly joaquin wondering
    what the hell i was doing,
                             '
                           |/_

Memory that unfamiliar echo
Broad spectrum sliced into a rainbow
The here and now become a fading signal
The analog life begets the digital

And sometimes I think too much of the noise is lost
Since only the shattered pieces of the mirror are reflecting
And something about the wiring is a bit too lossy
Since I always remember the thought but never the thinking

So when you cross the same old street
You better make sure you move your feet
Because you might get hit crossing the way
And remember something that happened today

-Uberfetus, 1999

March chokes April
And I choke the throttle
The memory chokes Mary
And Mary chokes the bottle

Blue always wanted to die on a Saturday)
Yellow didn't find the car till mid-May)
Brown said the front half was buried in mud)
Red threw up because of all that blood)

I choke on the silence
And Mary chokes up
And Phil chokes on his vomit
While driving his truck

-Uberfetus, 2001

You wake up with the metallic penny taste of blood in your mouth again. This is one of those things you'll never get used to, like an orgasm. You lick your lips searching for any cut, but you find none. Maybe it isn't even your own blood. Your life was hard as a kid, your parents fought a lot, there were constant crises, so you blocked out all of your past. Every time you wake up to a question about anything, it reminds you of how blank most of your life is.

You wish you knew what this soft and ethereal stuff that memories are made of was, and why you could only hold on to some of it, or why some of it was buried deeper inside you than you could dig. There were prickly pinpoints of sentient thoughts that pierced into your consciousness, providing a quick look, but ultimately reminding you how unattainable you were to yourself. The cruel joke you're always playing on you.

You search your upper lip and mouth further for any source of the blood. Still nothing. Suddenly, the violent coughing starts. More blood taste. Congratulation Sherlock, you've figured it out. The blood is coming from inside. Then you notice the gash that runs along your gut and the fact that half your organs aren't in you any more.

It's funny how as the life drains from you, your mind has the inverse effect. Parts of your life that were gone forever come back. The flood of solace and consolation washes over you. The beauty of your personal mystery, however, begins to slowly fade into a hard reality. Now you remember why you blocked out your life. The ugliness replaces the justification you feel in knowing yourself again.

Maybe death is just a final discovery of yourself and everything that's in you. A total realization of your entire life in a second. They say that your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but what if your life is a reel of hate and sadness? There is no heaven or hell; there is only a moment of reflection on everything stored in your brain.

You taste the blood again, and you're starting to get light-headed. You are now little more than a husk of a person experiencing your whole life over again, and soon you will be less than that. Just before you lose all consciousness, right before you submit, you remember the one time you were happy and content in your life, a time when the anger and hurt was gone, and you die more complete than you ever lived.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, No;¹

Memory is the mental process of storing and retrieving information in the brain. There are various levels of memory processing and different types of storing capacities that accompany each level. When information is received in the brain, it goes through several levels of sensory processing while it is stored; this is how human beings learn, by storing previously experienced environmental signals and comparing new ones to the ones already stored in the brain. The basic information-processing model for memory functioning is as follows:

Sensory Input → Sensory Memory → Short Term Memory → Long Term Memory

As information progresses through each of these levels, there tends to be a greater chance for retention farther into the future.

Levels of Memory

• Sensory Memory: Sensory memory is defined as the capacity to remember minute aspects and physical features of an object for very brief periods — most likely about a second or less. Due to this, sensory memory is almost indistinguishable from perception itself. This type of memory remains largely in theory; few analyses have been performed on information while it is in this stage of processing. The human mind cannot be directly aware of information while it exists in this level in the brain since it is so fleeting. It tends to be understood as the recognition of a perceptual whole, such as the brief memory of the experience of a faint sound or a briefly viewed image.

• Iconic Memory: Sensory memory is broken down further to include visual sensory memory, which holds a visual stimulus for the span of about one second. One of the best examples of how iconic memory functions is to imagine how your brain responds when viewing a lightning bolt. The image flashes for only a brief moment, yet the form of the lightning will linger in iconic memory for a second or so after the stimulus is removed.

• Echoic Memory: Another type of sensory memory is echoic memory, which accounts for sounds that have just been perceived. One of the easiest ways that this type of memory can be recognized is in the interpretation and processing of speech. As a word is pronounced by someone, we perceive it one syllable at a time. In order to grasp the whole word, each sound must be temporarily stored in the brain in order to more fully understand them later. If it weren't for this type of memory, then speech would be a disorganized chaos; humans would be unable to integrate information as it was delivered to them via speech.

• Short Term Memory: Short term memory is very similar to sensory memory in that its capacity is very limited by both the amount of information that can be held in it and also the duration that information can be held. In order to illustrate the capacity of short term memory, try the following.
  
  Read the numbers below only once and then close your eyes and repeat them to yourself:

3 8 1 4 7 0 2

More than likely, you had little difficulty recalling those pieces of information. Now, try reading the following different set of numbers once and closing your eyes to repeat them again:

1 6 2 9 0 4 3 7 2 5 1

Most people with normal memory capacities cannot recall 11 pieces of information in succession after having read them only once. This is because these stimuli were stored in short term memory, which has a capacity of between 7 and 9 pieces of information for the average person.

• Phonological short term memory: This is a type of short term memory that relies strongly on long term memory. Often when we are observing our surroundings, we will recognize certain objects, such as a tree, and we will think the word "tree." "Thinking" this word in this way is called a subvocal articulation, which is defined as an unspoken speech utterance. This is a manner of retaining information about our surroundings that integrate our language capacities with our perceptive faculties.

Subvocal articulations can also be used when information is transferred from short term memory to long term memory. This process is called the articulatory loop, and is part of the newer theories of working memory, an expansion of short term memory. Basically, this occurs when a person attempts to remember a piece of information by repeating it to themselves as well as recalling a mental picture of that piece of information to enforce it both verbally and visually.

• Long Term Memory: Long term memory holds information that is stored on a semi-permanent basis. There are no known limits on this type of memory. It occurs due to connections that are formed between neurons in the brain that are fairly static. Researchers argue that there can be strong connections between short term and long term memory. For example, the set of English characters "TXLKB" is much more easily recalled than the set of Greek characters "ΓΙΑΔΞ" (assuming that you're more knowledgeable of English than Greek, and have average memory capacities). This is because English letters have been learned by English-speaking people, and are stored in memory much more easily. This is related closely to phonological short term memory.

• Episodic Memory: This is a type of long term memory that acts as a recorder for events and experiences.

• Semantic Memory: Semantic memory is another type of long term memory that is associated with memories of data, such as vocabulary and general knowledge.

• Kinesthetic Memory: When performing physical tasks such as writing and walking, a type of memory known as kinesthetic memory is used. This type of memory is still highly theoretical; it is difficult to apply limits to it due to the lack of clinical testing. It applies to sequences of movements of the muscles and their relationship to each other while in motion, which is all retained in these types of memories.²

The articulatory loop is one process of encoding information into the long term memory. Further, there are two groups of long term memory processing.

• Effortful Processing: As its name suggests, this type of memory processing refers to the ways in which we consciously try to remember something. When students use flash cards to stimulate their minds visually and verbally, this is one example of effortful long term memory processing.

• Automatic Processing: This type of long term memory occurs when information is recalled with little attention to them. This can include events that are traumatic or startling.

Memory Conditions

• Conduction Aphasia: This condition results in the inability to remember words that are heard, even though the person might be able to respond to them at the time. This condition is caused by damage to Wernicke's area and Broca's area in the brain.

• Retrograde Amnesia: This condition involves the loss of previous long term memories, especially those concerning the individual's life. Often times, this is caused by a severe blow to the head. Usually this will result only in the loss of recent long term memories, rather than information that the person has known their whole lives. The reasons for this are still being researched.

• Anterograde Amnesia: This condition results in a patient being unable to form new long term memories after the time of the brain damage. Usually, they will be able to remember information for a period of several minutes, but beyond that they are unable to retain anything (this is Leonard's condition in the film Memento, which is a good example of what this disorder is like). They are often able to discuss things that happened to them before their injury, but they will not even be able to remember people they've see daily since their brain damage.

• Eidetic Memory or Photographic Memory: True to its name, individuals with photographic memories are able to recall events, objects, or information with extreme visual clarity. Some people experience similar types of memories when they have what is known as a flashbulb memory, an extremely lucid recollection of an event. However, individuals with photographic memories experience this all of the time. The transition between short term and long term memory is sometimes nonexistant for them, as they can often remember whatever they like without practicing the articulatory loop that many others do. Reasons for the existence of photographic memories are unknown. However, they are often tied to other conditions such as synesthesia, and I believe that it could be linked to a much more developed hippocampus; this is the area in the brain which controls memory.

¹John Donne. A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning.
²Information on kinesthetic memory from http://www.handle.org/miscinfo/glossary.html. Thanks to dutchess for reminding me of this type!

S