False Memory

The Miata runs again, has visited the smog testers, passed, and awaits her 2009 license plate sticker - only six months late. If you read this blog, you may recall that I was combing the house for two spare sets of supercharger idler bearings I was sure that I bought and then misplaced. Never found them. Went back to McMaster - Carr order history and can't find evidence that I ever bought them. So I bought a new set of bearings and finally fixed the car.

I live in a complex environment (some would say messy) and rely on memory to find a lot of things. What was I doing when I saw it last? Where was that? What would I have done with something like that? When it appears that I have remembered something that probably never happened, well, it sends a little chill down my spine. I remember those eight spare bearings pretty clearly. I have nice pictures of them in my brain, eight boxes all lined up in a row. Never happened, apparently. Or rather, whatever happened was confined within my skull. Did I dream it? Did I construct the memory because I required it?

If I could create realistic memories at will it might represent the triumph of fantasy life over reality. Why get out of bed if you're being believably seduced by lovely young women while you sleep? (Sorry dear, but men do occasionally think about such things.) It takes you right back to cogito ergo sum. Yeah, but you're just a brain in a cave somewhere imagining all of this. Philosophy fails as fertilizer once again.

Frankly, if you are unable to tell real life from your dreams you need to get out more. Real interactions with people have a texture and unanticipated quality that dreams do not. Don't writers construct believable, non-existent characters in their fiction? Yes, but I would argue that writers mostly rearrange their experience to create fiction. No experience, no fiction.

Do voyeuristic pastimes like pornography ultimately fail to arouse because they are insufficiently believable (all we need is High Definition?) or because no one is on the other end of the line? If we're just imagining life our imaginations run dry pretty quickly.

Admittedly this piece has drifted quite a ways from whether there are eight bearings lost in my house or not. Memory and it's stepchild fantasy are ultimately unreliable. Reality never follows the path anyone has imagined, not for long anyway. Winning the lottery doesn't make you luckier with the next ticket you buy. Just one more thing to contend with. Resolved: your memory is untrustworthy. One more trick life has for you if you live long enough to see it.