Memory Leaks

I’ve had memory leaks all my adult life. I use the phrase (which I may have stolen from someone) to describe sudden and momentary dislocations of consciousness, when I am struck by a single image from my past that is accompanied by an emotional force that can stop me in my tracks, but which generally fades as quickly as a dream under assault from an alarm clock, leaving just an impression, an aftertaste.

I’m not talking about memories of peak experiences, those moments of epiphany, ecstacy or loving tenderness that anyone would treasure, or the times of embarrassment, ugliness and despair that we would rather not remember at all, but that sometimes force themselves into consciousness. The  impressions I am left with are of mundane days and places, of walking down a road, entering a house, standing in a shop, sitting in an armchair watching the rain run down the window; specific, recognisable places and people and situations, but with nothing to mark them out from the other inconsequential quotidian moments that form the bulk of everyone’s lives.

When I read Slaughterhouse 5, I was struck by Billy Pilgrim’s coming ‘unstuck in time’. Perhaps this was what was happening to me, I though. I had drifted into my past life for some time, then returned a second or less after I left: the pang I felt was a sweet distillation of all the feelings I had experienced in that time, the impression merely the last thing I had experienced before I snapped back to the present.

Later, I flirted with the idea of backwards causality, that the reason these humdrum moments from the past were freighted with specialness was precisely because they would zap me in the future, lending a tinge of epiphany to the everyday; the more times a particular moment came back, the more intense the feeling. Suppose, I thought, that rather than the steady gradient or parabola usually employed to map out the passing of a lifetime, it was instead a squiggly scribble, the ravelled aftermath of a cosmic kitten pouncing on the unspooling thread. Perhaps these moments were nodes and knots in the general tangle.

Anyway, that’s by the by. I’m writing this now because I’ve had many of them over the past few weeks, bouncing me back into my past so often that yesterday I spent hours on Google Earth tracking down and looking at virtually every house I’d ever lived in, or even, at times, at the empty ground where they used to be, streets I had walked and the parks I had played in, looking for some clue to my psychic geography in the comfort of maps.

It’s possible that this increased frequency has something to do with the arrival and dispatch of the Xmas hashish, but to suggest that this is the sole cause not only insults my poetic, Romantic and self-mythologising sensibilities, but also too simplistic. I had memory leaks before I ever smoked anything, and in the last forty years of being an on and off dope fiend I’ve never noticed any particular correlation.

What led me to post this is a thought I had walking up the hill through the village, a swirl of fine rain, rivulets of red earth trickling from the front gardens of the cottages on the hill {oh, and then, as I wrote that, another leak, of walking on the very edge of the pavement an my way to my junior school along Philip Lane in Tottenham, fascinated by the way water was running through the gutters, eroding and making valleys in what I assume now must have been builder’s sand, shaping and reshaping, making shifting patterns; the accompanying feeling, an incongruous melancholy}. I’ve often heard it said that people’s lives flash before them before they die (although how do those who say this actually know?), not so much a leak as a dam burst of memory, a flood that scours the landscape and carries away all traces of life and industry. What if these memory leaks are a harbinger of this event, and their increased frequency an indication of its proximity?

Maybe it’s time to head for the higher ground.