THE MEMORY OF GHOSTS
December, 2009
December is a time for remembering. The opening
lyrics of The Fantastiks invite the audience to “try to remember” that
deep in December without a hurt the heart is hollow and that it’s
nice to remember earlier days when “grass was greener and
grain was yellow,” when our perceptions were more accurate
than our memories.
Barbra Streisand reminds us that memories light
the corner of our minds and help us recall the way we were. “Mem'ries,
may be beautiful and yet What's too painful to remember, We simply
choose to forget.”
And from Cats, “Memory, all alone in
the moonlight, I can dream of the old days. Life was beautiful
then. I remember the time I knew what happiness was. Let the
memory live again.”
These musical cliches aside, memory is important
to the human psyche, for it is our past that shapes our future.
When the Ghost of Christmas Past makes his appearance, Scrooge
asks, “Long
Past?” “No,” says the ghost, “Your past.” Our
past is not as it was, but as we remember it. Thus, we can have
our roses in December.
The question arises, however, in how memories are storied, processed,
and retrieved. What happens to persons with dementia? Does the
loss of functional memory mean that they have lost the sense of
who they are? Early brain research held that memories were stored
in the hippocampus. Later research has shown that older memories
are transferred to the frontal cortex, and perhaps other parts
of the brain such as the amygdala. Karl Pribram believes that the
brain serves as a holographic assembler that takes fragments of
memory from various parts and creates a meaningful whole. The Canadian
neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, found that by stimulating certain
parts of the brain he could create a sequential record of consciousness.
Thus, the issue becomes not whether you can retain memory, but
whether you can retrieve it.
However, based on a purely medical or neurological
understanding whereby memory is a product of the brain’s function, when
the body dies, memory dies. Since our memory shapes who we are,
what happens when we die? Or asked another way, “Do ghosts
have memory?”
The ancient Druids ( from the Gaelic meaning “oak-knower”)
believed that trees, especially oaks, were the repositories of
the tribal wisdom, that they possessed the memory of the Celtic
peoples (thus Enya’s CD, “The Memory of Trees).” It
is a belief held in many cultures and philosophies that memory
or mind can coalesce and exist outside of its container, that we
are simply processors of thought, memory, universal wisdom. Do
our collective memories become one with a universal mind, a collective
unconscious, the Mind of God? Do “good” memories and
faith beliefs create a state of mind, commonly known as “heaven?” Does
the inability to connect with this Unconscious or personal memory
place one in a state of nonexistence, of not being aware of one’s
own existence, a “hell” of one’s own creation
or lack thereof?
Whether apparitions are “false creations proceeding from the
heat-oppressed brain” or purposeful essences that retain their
memories and individuality, I choose to believe that there is some
order to the universe and a reason for being. If I can only remember
what it was.
Dr. Harry L. Serio |