The event
A beetle at the glass.
Dated, if we have a date. Small. Checkable, if a record was made.
English / Latin · memoria
memory
What remains, and what is rebuilt in the remaining.
Latin memoria. English kept the storehouse too long.1
Serial reproduction
Each looking copies the last looking, not the event. Bartlett called this reconstruction. The fifth frame is not more true.2
The remembering
A scarab, the night I was ready.
Schema, later reading, a theory already loved. Larger than the event. Not therefore false. Not therefore the event.
Latin memoria. English kept the storehouse metaphor too long. Experimental psychology, from Bartlett onward, treats remembering as reconstruction.
Recall, schema, false memory, salience, retrospective pattern-making. Especially important for dream journals and synchronicity notebooks.
What the gloss loses
Memory as playback. The gloss loses the editing.
Misuse
Manufacturing memory to explain a feeling. Confidence as a measure of accuracy.
What remained, and what did memory add?
Notes
- Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. memoria.
- F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).
