How To Remember

An old friend, Joe, has been visiting from the other side of the world. My girlfriend asks, ‘What’s the oldest photograph of you together?’ He clicks on my features and his phone searches the archive. I’m thirty, twenty-five, twenty, nineteen, fourteen. We are skateboarding. We are moving to Dundee. We are walking the West Highland way. I had taken a film camera with only half a spool left. Fifteen pictures, black and white, mostly taken at the summit of Ben Nevis. Bright cloud and deep snow, we are wearing black in horizonless white. Joe has photographs from our descent. I had almost forgotten about it. We could hear a faint voice, calling through the wind. There was no one else around, but the voice came from inside the clouds. We walked to the edge of the snow and peered over. A climber was stuck down there, calling for help. He had been calling for a long time. He had strayed from his route and ended up on an outcrop of compacted snow and ice. He could feel it shifting. He didn’t want to climb back down in case the whole thing fell. The climber guessed that the snow ridge went back a good two or three metres. As our friends joined us, and we pointed at the climber, smiling over the edge at him, the climber asked, ‘How many of you are standing there?’ Five, we said. He panicked a little. Territorial of our find, Joe and I sent the others back and crouched down, as though that would make us lighter. We turned to the climber and smiled some more. We were happy to help. He sent us for rope. We ran back up the summit of Ben Nevis, searching, poetically, for a mountain climber among all these hillwalkers.

Joe photographed, (in full colour), the mountain climber we eventually found, digging a circular channel in the snow, looping his rope into that channel and creating a kind of improvised pulley. Lastly, we have a photograph of the climber we rescued, smiling.

My memories of the walk had resolved around my fifteen black and white photos, and eroded everything else. Although I remember the stranded climber, I never talk about it, because I don’t think people believe me when I do. Similar moments from the trip are undocumented, and therefore, slightly unreal. Waking in the middle of the night with our tent surrounded by a herd of deer. Leaving a pub to immediately face a young stag lowering its antlers. A tiny lamb charging at my legs and clattering through my boots, back and forth, until a great ram came to back it up.

I have a quote, which fittingly, I can’t remember. It’s something like, ‘every technology is an amputation of the human.’ It sounds like something Heidegger would say. But when I turn to Google, the algorithm corrects me, it’s Marshal Mcluhan. Though I can only find others paraphrasing the quote. Mediated through a couple of blog posts and essays, it seems like the quote is something more like ‘every technology is both an extension, and an amputation of the human body.’ I read Mcluhan’s The Medium is the Massage in 2008, only because they recommended it on the art school syllabus. I didn’t understand it, but luckily, none of the ideas in it ever came up. In fact, hardly any ideas ever came up. I must have come across the quote more recently, but I’ve no idea where. I can remember having used the quote in the pub last weekend though. It’s useful to have some of these phrases to hand, when conversation turns intellectual, you can patch over the gaps in your knowledge with a suggestive, but non-committal quote.

Joe’s indexed and curated archive of photographs has extended his memory, and in the absence of an indexed archive of photographs, I more or less no longer have a memory. He got the extension, I got the amputation. After several head injuries of varying intensity, I am no longer able to confidently remember anything. Including my pin number, post code and phone number. The possibility that I could be wrong is so high that I always need to check just in case. Having said that, by constantly worrying that I will forget, I manage to remember all these things correctly on the first try. But I worry that if I begin confidently remembering things, that I will grow lazy, and open the gateway to forgetting again.

Throughout primary school, I had a method of remembering. I have no idea where this method comes from, nor what I was using it for. It is a drastically simplified Method Of Loci. But where the ancients would imagine great buildings, staircases leading to corridors full of rooms, furnished with cabinets and bookshelves bursting with information, I only imagined a single brick. A sleek, marble cobblestone. Rubble, picked from the ruins of the Memory Palace.

You need to imagine a little door in the top of your head. It has a keyhole. You click your fingers once, and a key appears in your hand. You use this to unlock the door at the top of your head. You click your fingers again, and the key disappears. Then reach inside your head and pull out a cube about the size of an apple. You click your fingers and the key appears, click again, the key disappears, click once more and a pencil now appears. You can write on the surface of the cube.

But first you have to rub out the things which are already written there. Two more finger clicks make the pencil disappear and a rubber appear. Then back through the sequence, rubber goes, key appears then disappears, then pencil reappears. Then you write down the idea you want to remember and replace the cube in the middle of your head, close the little door, click your fingers until the key appears and make sure to lock your skull again. Otherwise, the cube could fall out, or worse, something else could work its way into your skull.

Lastly, it is also very important to make sure you have properly sequenced your finger clicks, and that the key for your skull has been carefully put away. Otherwise, it is possible you might roll over and lose the key in your bed sheets, making your skull completely impregnable. If you wake up unable to recall your idea, you may be forced to use extremely drastic measures to reopen your skull and access the hidden cube.