Why is our memory so valuable to us? Beyond its obvious role for survival, let us focus on three key aspects: first, we take pleasure in remembering and reminiscing. Second, our memories help us understand ourselves, others and our place in the world. Third, our memories play a crucial role for personal identity: who we are as persons is determined by our memories. These constitute our selves, so you are literally made, in part, of your memories. Our memories are valuable because they help make us who we are as individuals.
Yannick Kappes
Writing is not about the present moment, although it can be and often is. No, writing allows me to consider the past as a continuous stream of thoughts and memories that flow through me to the sea of my mind, there to merge with the infinite. Art does this. And photography, and music. But writing does it all,and in the end, does it best, living on into some kind of future that keeps it alive.
Lately, however, I have had trouble coming up with anything to say. I have hundreds of writing prompts in my notes app on my phone, and tonight I have been scrolling through Subfolder 10, gleaning bits and pieces from my recent readings and trying to get inspired. But nothing much has clicked. After 26 years of continuous online journal writing, the old boy ain’t what he used to be. The flames of earlier enthusiasm are now embers, still alive but just flickering. I really have to motivate myself to write now.
The intoxicating, overwhelming waves of stimulation from YouTube and the internet in general, and now ChatGPT, have packed my brain with so much I can hardly remember any of it. What is important for me to know now? What should I be reading after I put away my phone for a designated portion of the day? (Laughs)
I am going through a manila folder packed with copies of emails, transcripts of chats from 20 years ago, and articles I’ve saved, including one from “Orion Magazine” titled, “Stillness” by Scott Russell Sanders, one of my favorite essayists. But this folder mostly contains long ago emails I compulsively printed out back in the day when email was an exciting and novel new form of written communication. I never print any out nowadays, partly because there are so few in my saved emails folder on my phone. Years ago, I simply titled it “Personal” and saved the few emails I received then and now in that folder.
But this one manila folder, among the hundred or so I have in numerous boxes and other containers going back to my high school days, are collectively a huge “Memory Vault.” This is the only way I can recall my past in any detail now. It’s about the only way I can add more essays to my online archive of 1,200 other essays.
I know I need to keep writing because that’s how I will preserver and protect this ego, id, Identity, and person I know intimately, and yet not as much as I think I do as I pass the halfway point to turning 75 next Spring. There’s a lot of great “stuff” in that vault.
Some evenings I’ll systematically go through several manila folders, creased and yellowing with age, like the newspaper clippings contained within some of them. It’s always a bit of a shock to see these yellowed old pieces of newsprint because 50 years is a long time to hold onto them. And I will never part with them because doing so would effectively erase parts of me.
Knowing I can rely on these countless artifacts and pieces of printed memorabilia reassures me that I will always find material in my Memory Vault that enables me to trigger memories and enable writing to continue to flow from these sources, just as a perennial spring of pure water in the desert satisfies the thirst of individual seekers and pilgrims traveling alone on their solitary “long and winding roads.” I’m still on that personal road of mine, even as I have veered off into the wilderness many times over the years.
I think all those who call themselves “writers” — whatever they write — would consider this passion as necessary as food and water for their survival, or at the least, their preservation of, and continuation as, the person they have become through lifetimes of lived experience and cultivation of their minds, hearts and soul.
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