Reality Hunger (18 page)

I want books to be equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought, not flattening it out with either linear narrative (traditional novel) or smooth recount (standard memoir).
In Search of Lost Time
, Mary McCarthy’s
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory
, Slater’s
Lying
foreground these issues by emphasizing the flawed processes of recollection of their narrators.

The world is everything that is the case.

If you was hit by a truck and you was lyin’ out in that gutter dyin’, and you had time to sing one song, one song people would remember before you’re dirt, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up, you tellin’ me that’s the song you’d sing? That same Jimmie Davis tune we hear on the radio all day? About your peace within and how it’s real and how you’re gonna shout it? Or would you sing something different? Something real, something you felt? Because I’m tellin’ you right now: that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain’t got nothin’ to do with believin’ in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believin’ in yourself.

Reality-based art is a metaphor for the fact that this is all there is, there ain’t no more.

memory

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine Muses.

Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you “remember” is covering the “real story,” anyway.

Reality takes shape in memory alone.

Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.

According to Ulric Neisser’s analysis of the structure of episodic memory, we rely—in our remembering—on complex narrative strategies that closely resemble the strategies writers use to produce realist fiction. David Pillemer, whose specialty is “vivid memories,” thinks that it takes something like a painter’s touch (the mind being the painter) to bring a memory to life and create belief. Antonio Damasio compares consciousness to a “movie in the brain” and argues that memories are just one among the many captions and images that our mind makes up to help us survive in the world. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.