Looking back through broken glass
Is Mnemosyne always honest? Or is her sister more present than we can possibly imagine?
“There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne, but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, for they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.”
Richard Holmes, A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting
The recent BBC drama The Jetty was absolutely fascinating, not necessarily for the plot, but for the way the story line explored memory. The past and the present were juxtaposed brutally. Which was somewhat confusing at first because Malachy/Mac looked exactly the same notwithstanding a 15 year time difference.
The father of the missing girl couldn't remember when she was actually last home because he wasn't there. Was his memory more or less reliable than that of the kebab van man with a criminal record? Ember's recollection of that night after days of revisiting that period in her life is a twist I didn’t see coming. And it raises the question of did she suddenly recall something that she had blotted out, or was she creating something from images that remained in her mind from a drug and drink fuelled party?
So how reliable is memory? I've read that the police don’t rate eye witness evidence highly, on account of it often being inaccurate. I read a statistic that 75% of convictions that were later quashed as wrongful were based on eye witness evidence, and later found to be unsafe on account of forensic evidence[1]. And it's easy to see why - do remember the colour and make of the car in front of you when you were driving home yesterday? I don't. Even though I thought about doing this as an conscious exercise.
So how then does memory form our story and our sense of self? It's something I've had thrown in front of me to ponder in the past week. My brother and I had a very surreal joint trip down memory lane, during a Whatsapp call across the Atlantic. The conversation started around our mother's questionable recall of recent events and downright re-invention of others. It ended up with a “do you remember when …” exploration of our teenage years.
In looking back across time, we realised that our perspectives were both different and incomplete. It felt like we were looking at the past through a shattered mirror. Whilst we could see the same outlines and patterns, we both remembered different details. Sometimes they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. Sometimes they are of different things, both of which fit in the overall outline, and fleshed out some details. Sometimes they didn't match up at all. It's like Mnemosyne is playing tricks, giving us some details but withholding others. Or maybe it's her unnamed sister casting a cloak of forgetting on some things. Maybe there are things that one or both of us have just blanked out.
Occasionally the mismatch in recollection is two different events blending into one. Sometimes only one of us was actually present. My brother had his own transport; I was stuck at home without a means of getting anywhere else. I experienced things that he didn’t and vice versa. But we were able to fill gaps in each other’s knowledge, which made some things fall into place in a way that neither of us were expecting. Filling in the missing shards from the broken mirror leads to the emergence of a coherent picture. Think of an old painting being cleaned finally revealing details that had been obscured by layers of dirt. The new image may not be one we like, because it does not have the comforting familiarity of the old.
Some events we recalled slightly differently, like looking at the same landscape from a different angle. If you look at something through one eye, you have no depth of field. The picture in front of you is strictly in two dimensions. Open both eyes, and you get a 3D image. That's where things that seemed flat and insignificant suddenly stand out. That is what happened, metaphorically speaking, as the two of us explored shared memories. The details highlighted aren't the elements my brother and I agree on as fact, but the nuances and shadows that the other's input has provided.
People and events have shifted from what I thought I knew. Some of the pictures that now seem clearer have fundamentally rocked my understanding of my family and myself in a seismic shift that is totally discombobulating. I've discovered a web of secrets and lies that I have either forgotten or chosen to block out. Mnemosyne playing tricks or her sister at work?
I've known for years that there are gaps in my memory of my pre-teen years. There is a whole chunk missing that relates to being uprooted, dumped in a foreign country, in a house in the middle of nowhere, and put into a school where I didn't speak the language. There's a period of around a year for which I have fragments of memory and random images, but my conscious mind really doesn't want to revisit that time. A psychologist would probably label this as trauma. I call it self-preservation. But how far into my teenage years do the gaps extend? I've come to realise much further than I initially thought.
“Something is stirring in my memory, and I remain completely still in my chair, so whatever it is that is emerging from hiding will not be frightened off. It takes shape slowly, like clouds forming.”
Tan Twang Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
Piecing together the past may make some things whole, and create a context in which the weird makes sense. But this has created unexpected ripples or even waves in the present. A valid question is how accurate is my brother's recollection of events - or mine for that matter. And whether we are bringing biases into interpreting the new vista before us. As L.P. Hartley wrote "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". You only have to watch comedy from the 80s to understand the extent to which things that were acceptable then are not four decades later.
It's a shame that The Jetty didn't really explore that aspect of examining what happened years ago beyond laying some seeds of doubt for the purposes of good drama. Firstly Ember coming to terms with the suspicion that her late husband may have killed someone. Secondly her discovery of who the killer actually was. The final scene of three generations of women renewing their bonds doesn't really cut it. Exposing hidden truths hits you like a sucker punch. The question for me right now is how far do I want to go in unpicking the seams of my memory.
I wandered down memory lane with my brother entirely unprepared. For now, we're both trawling through photo albums for concrete evidence of a couple of things. I can understand why Ruth Wilson worked on a dramatised version of her bigamous grandfather's secrets and lies (Mrs Wilson, BBC, 2019). I've been writing a lot to make sense of what I now know. It feels like I'm tussling with Mnemosyne and her sister again - the altar of the Goddess of Forgetting seems quite appealing right now. And I can’t help wonder if my mother deliberately worships there.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/how-reliable-eyewitness-testimony-scientists-weigh
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cd39ba-4baf-45ad-8c06-fb9d0e0a4116_801x301.png)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67b34c05-844a-4566-ba2f-40c79d453e58_500x500.jpeg)
It’s hard sometimes, isn’t it? I’ve started a trawl through literature to find out if there is name for the Goddess of Forgetting. I’m tending to think that Mnemosyne could be a a double aspect deity, like Janus, the God of beginnings and endings. Because like beginnings and endings, remembering and forgetting are two faces of the same coin. But that’s just my opinion
I have been thinking about that opening quote so much since our gathering. Memory is vital yet fickle and unreliable. Holding our memories up to the light alongside those of others who were there but saw something different always makes me think of X-rays under scrutiny. What might we find that we didn’t notice before? Fascinating ponderings Julie