Lately, I have been listening to Daft Punk - and in my autoplay, their 2014 Grammy Award winning album Random Access Memories come up. Its an interesting album - many folks say the mood of the album is very bipolar - shifting from happy funky sounds, to melancholic arpeggios (a statement of the album is "dancing with tears in your eyes"). The theme and name is apt - the point of the album is to invoke different random memories through the music.
But in a more technical sense, Random Access Memory (RAM) is a critical component of computers. It is the main memory type, and the operating system, files, applications, are kept within reach of the CPU. It's much faster than a hard drive, and the unique part is that memory is just randomly written into the space (there is no bookkeeper who organizes the pieces of info). The only drawback is once the computer is off - all memory in RAM gone. It cannot hold anything permanently like a hard drive can.
It really brought me to think that our brains are essentially just RAM of different degrees - our memories are only kept in our brains for as long as we are alive and are able to access them, and our long-term memory can be considered just RAM with a higher capacity, than our short term memories. And the funny part is, our memories really don't have a filing system attached - just like RAM in a computer, our memories are just thrown into our brain - we don't get to say - hey fill up this portion of our brain first!
I got to thinking, and it brought up the question - are we just the product of our memories?
My grandmother is suffering from late stage Alzheimers brought on by Parkinson's Disease - she has trouble remembering, speaking, and is with full time care. She is not the person I remember from my childhood, and besides the fact the she looks similar to the person in my memories, I would be hard-pressed to say its her.
But that's a selfish mode of thought right? Why am I basing who my grandmother is on a bunch of random memories? Why does it matter that she remembers who we are? Is it not enough that she physically exists?
Christopher Nolan's Memento tried to answer this - Guy Pearce's character loses his memory every 15 minutes. Even the movie is chopped into this 15 minute segments which to make sense in a linear narrative, the entire movie needs to be watched backwards from the end. We wouldn't say that Guy Pearce is not human, or he is devoid of humanity - he is perhaps more human than all of us because he is forced to relive his new memories every 15 minutes!
My grandmother really only remembers her memories from long ago. But
every now and then, something will randomly click, and her memories will come back to her. I came to realize that we cannot simply be a product of our memories - even if my grandmother can't remember me - she is still my grandmother, still the same person who took care of me when I was young, still the same person who brought me a chocolate every time I came home from school, still the same person who argued and fought with me like a sister.
It brought me to realize, that I can call my grandmother, whom I call Nan, because she is a part of my memories. I am insanely lucky that she has been around my entire life; and those memories created in yesterday's happiness are causing today's sadness.
So I don't really push her to remember me anymore - when I do get to talk with her, I am content to hold the phone and sit in silence. Perhaps what gives me consolation is that I can see that she is still there, a visual confirmation of my memories, or maybe I don't have the heart to see her try to remember something she can't.
And just like the Daft Punk album, I hope that somewhere, maybe my face, or seeing or hearing something familiar, will help randomly click her memories. But till then, I am thankful to her for having shared part of her life with me.
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