Trauma & Art

Seminal memories

A couple of posts ago I referred to a book I was reading, Life in a Fishbowl by Len Vlahos. In brief, fifteen-year-old Jackie Stone and her family end up prisoners in their own house. Everything they say and do is being recorded and broadcast to every television in the country. The reason being her father, who is dying of a brain tumor, and has auctioned his life on eBay, in order to provide for his family when he’s gone, to the highest bidder: a ruthless TV reality show executive. The more poignant character voices were Jackie’s, the eldest teenage daughter, who despite her young age is aware of the significance of freedom and privacy and the right to live and die with dignity. The second voice belongs to Glio, the personified malignant brain tumor, which is devouring areas of Jared’s brain, as well as, his memories. In some sense through Glio’s voice neuroscience, information on memory and fiction come together. The first extract I have chosen to share refers to the erasing of the character’s seminal memory by Glio.

Seminal memories are those memories, usually early ones, which influence how we interact with the world and can determine to one degree or other what we become. I while ago I read in a magazine that even our gardening preferences may be determined by our seminal early experiences of gardens, landscapes or a plant from childhood.  Memories and past events live in the present and often unconsciously define our experience. In a chapter to do with racism and normality Foluke Taylor writes about how when memory is viewed only as history it creates a discontinuity and obscures the fact that past experiences and memories define and inform the present, who we become and how we live. She writes: “And the question echoes until it becomes exhortation, a call to not only remember but to shake loose the idea of memory as history – as relating to things past. When we leave those days behind – to put shame, rupture, and unpaid debt into a past – we hit the wrong note; introduce a false discontinuity that leaves us confused now, in these days. How do we remember what we already know, which is to assess current trouble in the context of its clinical history; to explore detail and make links; to be alert to – and able to bear – how the past-that-is-not-past shows up in relational struggles right here, right now.”

Anyway, back to the book extract where Glio consumes one of Jared’s significant memories.

“Jared barely made it to his office futon…… Once there, he drifted quickly off to sleep. With fewer and fewer memories for his brain to access, the fewest possible neurons were firing; only those needed to control his most basic bodily functions were active. Jared’s sleep was as peaceful and deep as Crater Lake. It was in this moment that Glio reached the nadir of his existence, the consumption of Jared’s seminal memory. All people have such a memory, the one moment in time that, more than any other, defines who they are and who they are to become. For most, it’s something that happens in the fourth or fifth year of life, after the brain has developed enough intellectual capacity to begin to comprehend the world, but not enough emotional capacity to process the new thoughts streaming along its synaptic pathways. For a few people, those able to overcome the circumstances of an unfortunate existence, it happens later in life. Jared’s seminal moment happened just after his fourth birthday.

The sky was the color of the Caribbean Sea, a few clouds billowing through the ether like punctuation— ellipses and commas, not periods or exclamation points. The sun warmed Jared’s skin as he sat in the grass moving a toy cement mixer back and forth. His father, engrossed in a book, sat in a lawn chair a few feet away. All of a sudden, little Jared began to blubber. Quick as a wink, his father was kneeling beside him— though in Jared’s memory, his father moved in slow motion, taking an entire age of man to cross the stone patio to his distraught son. “What is it, Jared?” his father asked, his concern real but measured. “Bug!” Jared shouted, and pointed at a grasshopper that had landed on his truck. “Bug!” “Oh, well, we can fix that,” his father said. Glio expected to see the father shoo the grasshopper away, but he didn’t.

He was astonished to see Jared’s father pick up the grasshopper and hold it out for his son to examine, the creature immobile in the gentle grasp of the man’s forefinger and thumb. “You see, Jared,” his father told him, “whatever you’re afraid of is probably way more scared of you.” Jared was just old enough to grasp this concept, and he let it rattle around in his brain. “Really?” he asked. “Really,” his father told him. “Just look at this grasshopper. You’re ten times his size.” Jared smiled. “No, wait, you’re a hundred times his size.” Jared’s smile crept into a laugh. His father went through a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and a million until little Jared was doubled over in laughter.

He was scared of many things after that but never so completely frightened that he was paralyzed. That moment helped Jared see the world the way he was sure it was meant to be seen. The lesson followed him unconsciously through the rest of his life, giving shape to the character that would come to define who he was. When Glio finished the memory, he swam through a sea of psychoses, largely calm waters dulled by the pain-relieving drugs Jared had been prescribed in the wake of the radiation. From there, he climbed mountains of regret, reaching their craggy summits with ease. On the other side was a kind of Shangri-la of mirth: memories of joy and abandon.”

The second extract is Jackie’s poignant plea on YouTube to the viewing public to stop watching the reality show in order for the family to reclaim their privacy and allow her father to die with dignity.

“Jackie gave the phone to Jason Sanderson, who tucked it inside a cardboard rock he “borrowed” from the school’s drama department. That night, while all of America, including everyone in the Stone household, was watching Life and Death, Jason rode his bike to Jackie’s house and threw the rock over the seven-foot-high fence into the backyard. Jackie retrieved it the next day. Now Max was looking at fifteen minutes of brand-new footage. He was giddy. With the crew on strict orders to stop Jackie from filming, capturing footage had become much more difficult,

Jackie and Max wrote it together, and she recorded it while she was in the computer lab at school. It was a poignant plea from Jackie to the American viewing public to let her father die with dignity: It’s not just the cameras and the microphones. If they were capturing the truth, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, if I’m being honest, my family— well, really, my parents— signed on for all this when they invited ATN into our house. But they didn’t sign on for the lies. The network doesn’t want you to know the truth. They want you to see my dad at his worst; they want you to think my mother, sister, and I are helpless; they want you to think we give a shit about Jo Garvin……..This isn’t real life. Nothing on TV is real life. It is fiction. The only part of this that’s true is that my dad is dying, and that he is— that we are— being robbed of our privacy and dignity. Think about it. What if your father or mother or sister or brother was dying? What if it was your son? What would you want? If you really care what happens to my dad, if you really care what happens to our family— Max cut to an extreme close-up of Jackie talking to the camera— then I beg you, don’t watch the lie that is Life and Death. I promise I will give you updates via YouTube, but please, get these damn cameras out of my house.”