The act of forgetting

Memory is pain. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet portray a couple who each undergo a procedure to erase any memory of the other from their minds. The whole idea is to remove the pain and anger inevitably associated with a failed romance.

But there’s a twist. The Jim Carrey character realises how much he values his memories of his former girlfriend, and tries to do everything in his power to save them. In the end, it seems, that without those memories, which are precious to him, he is doomed to repeat the past. In the act of forgetting, he loses something of himself.

If you could erase all memory of a relationship, would you do it? Remove every last trace of someone from your past? Find and destroy every neural connection, as if you were reformatting your hard drive?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the act of forgetting lately. Forgetting is a response to pain: to forget is to survive. Some would argue that the entire notion of a post-apartheid South African national identity is a mass act of forgetting — a kind of necessary forgetfulness, one that will allow us to celebrate the Fifa World Cup in a state of blissful amnesia.

But I don’t want to talk about politics. I want to talk about what it feels like to forget.

Memory is a strange thing. I can hardly remember the life that ended technically at the end of September last year, officially on November 6. I know that it happened, there is photographic evidence, and I know it is there. But it might as well have happened to somebody else. Ten years are parceled up and put away at the top of the cupboard, like last season’s summer clothes, the ones that really should be given to charity. Alternatively, I could use the analogy of a room: the door isn’t locked — unlike Bluebeard’s Castle — but I don’t feel any need to go in there. In the act of forgetting, I have sought peace. I don’t want to remember. I want to be in the present, where all that truly matters is the here and now.

There are a few memories I do want to hold onto, though. Most of them date from a tentative new existence. They are a source of consolation, a reminder of how wonderful it can be to be in the world, despite all the misery it brings us.

So, here is a list of some of those memories I don’t want to lose:

Fireflies in the grass as twilight slipped almost imperceptibly into night, at Shingwedzi in the Kruger Park; tiny animated sparks flashing code to their mates and rivals.
Sitting on a rock at Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, the endless gum forest stretching out far, far below, the wind carrying only the sound of a distant waterfall and the thin cries of birds.
A glorious shimmering cloud of mayflies, like something out of Avatar, in Nyalaland in the far north of the Kruger Park.
Standing on the top of Makahane’s Kop — again in Nyalaland — leaning against three-hundred-year-old stone walls and gazing at the gorge beyond, while a pair of black eagles lazed past on the thermals and an elephant shrew scuttled across the rocks below.
Dancing to 80s music with 20-year-olds in a tiny club on Long Street and not giving a damn how stupid I looked.
Lying face down on a flat warm rock, my fingers dipped in the coolness of the Luvuvhu river, my ears filled with the ceaseless rush of water.
Racing the local Jack Russell terrier up and down the dunes at Qolora Mouth on the Wild Coast, scattering the sanderlings and flinging my despair into the waves.
Skinny dipping under the stars in the bush on New Year’s Eve.
And yes — weirdly — walking smack bang into a sharp branch while out hiking, with such force that there was blood everywhere. There is a scar on my forehead now, and I want to keep it.

Many of these recollections are bound with a sense of loss, an inchoate longing for another who now lost to me and (perhaps worse) does not recall these things with the reverence that I do. How do we hold onto memories we love, without trying to edit out those who remind us that our stories do not end happily ever after? How do we not allow the memory of others to spoil them, when we know that they will bring us the pain that comes from the failure of possibility, otherwise known as disappointment? I’d love to hear the answer, because I certainly don’t have it.

What I do know is that I cannot lose these particular memories because I treasure them: they have forced me to acknowledge that it can be lovely to be alive and aware at times when I’ve long since embraced the conviction that existence has little to offer besides more plodding despair. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is serene, but it is also empty and echoing. We are our memories, after all. Without them, what is left of us?