Memories allow us to make sense of the world.
“When it comes to remembering our past, everything seems to go warm and fuzzy”. (Leunig)
If all conscious experiences can be thought of as what Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman calls a “remembered present”, then the way we remember impacts upon how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Often we look back on our childhood and remember the past almost as if we were two different people. Why? Because as we gain wisdom and accumulate knowledge, we gain different perspectives help us reshape our views and values.
Memories are like a slide show in our mind. They enable us to look back at past events and experiences and organise what might have been a jumble of chaotic occurrences into a time sequence. Professor David Gallo, psychologist and director of the Memory Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago, says that after we experience something, we retell it which allows our “brain another chance to encode it” and the more we revisit our memories, so the more we redefine and rethink who we are. Often we reshuffle our memories and we change the order. At any given moment, we are our past and our past defines us.
From a symbolic perspective, we are the presenters or narrators rearranging the slides into a presentable order, and deleting those that do not fit. As Gallo explains every time we arrange one slide or image we are also encoding that memory, the traces of which vary in intensity over time. In this regard Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, revisits his past in a way that constantly strengthens his missed opportunities and makes him believe that it is still possible to realise the dream of the salesman.
Xinran the author of The Good Women of China states: “When you walk into your memories, you are opening a door to the past; the road within has many branches, and the route is different every time.”
In this regard, Arthur miller structures Death of a Salesman in a way that enables Willy to move in and out of the narrative sequence of his life. In his stage directions, Miller expressly notes that in the present, there is an imaginary border. The characters are to observe the “wall-lines”. In the scenes of the past, “these boundaries are broken” and characters enter or leave a room by stepping “through” a wall onto the forestage.” Symbolically, the past appears then as unbroken line with the present, influencing everything that happens. As Miller also suggests Willy’s past decisions clearly influence the choices he makes. Most significantly, he remembers how he was about to follow his brother Ben and his father to Alaska, “And I was almost decided to go, when I met a salesman in the Parker House.” As we know, Dave Singleman with his “green velvet slippers” could command an audience and still made a very respectable living. In this regard, both Dave and Ben are characters who loom large in Willy’s past imaginings. Ben is the reminder of just how much Willy has lost through the choice of role model. Ben explains, “I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And by God, I was rich!” (41)
In many ways, memories do enable us to shuffle the slides around and make life more bearable. Often we exaggerate certain events and minimise others. WE organise the slides selectively choosing those that best fit our vision of ourselves. In Willy’s case this comes at a dangerous price, because he refashions the past to imagine a more idealistic portrait of himself and his sons, particularly Biff. Willy exaggerates his reputation, status and popularity. He boasts to Biff that he is greeted by mayors in the major cities such as Providence and “New England”. However, as Arthur Miller shows, the more illusory and fake the dream, the bigger the fall. The more one starts to believe in a shaky and false reality, the more unstable one becomes. The metaphoric car crashes symbolises his unstable personality and his inability to accept that his job is so insecure that he is dependent upon Charley for $50 hand-outs.
Contrastingly, some memories give us an insight into who we are and important relationships in our life. They enable us to put things into perspective especially if we wish to remain true to our vision of ourselves. Biff clearly remembers the night he chanced upon Willy and his lover after his maths exam. The exposure of Willy’s insincerity, sends his dream of popularity and fame crashing and he rejects the Loman brand. Thereafter Biff just wants to work in the big wide open spaces. Miller shows how we all construct memories about events in different ways to suit our views and values.
Not only do individuals selective rearrange memories to suit themselves, but collectively governments and powerful institutions also try to influence our national psyche and our own memories. Governments often recreate the truth through the information they provide and conceal. Leunig criticises the way that the Howard Government and the media colluded to influence our response to the evil dictator. Last year, even George Bush admitted that his government fabricated information regarding weapons of mass destruction in order to prepare a case for war. His personal memories of this decision also reveal a connection with collective realities. “In the run up to the war my administration made claims that turned out not to be factual. Personally, I truly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But when we couldn’t find the evidence, we fabricated it.” This admission from former US President George W Bush provides a stark reminder of what can happen when powerful institutions misrepresent or distort reality. In this case, the tendency to “misoverexaggerate the nature of the threat”, led to the Iraq War in 2002. Up to the 10-year anniversary of the war, which prompted Mr Bush’s apology, the war had claimed the lives of at least 36,000 US soldiers and more than 100,000 civilians.
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