I was reading a post by
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handworn yesterday in which he was talking about his earliest memories. Naturally, that started me thinking about mine.
There is a bit of familial controversy about what I classify as my earliest memory. My parents used to take me out to a local lake where we'd float on a raft. My father would go swimming and he'd sometimes hold me in the water next to him and the raft, bobbing me up and down while I splashed and laughed and loved it loved it loved it. I remember the joy of that water quite clearly, the cool temperature on a hot day, the feeling of buoyancy, the worn, dark wood of the raft, my mother sitting on it watching us, dressed in some light colored shirt over a bathing suit, and she was laughing—just a moment in time, but a lovely one, preserved in my memory.
The trouble is, my mother says that they never went to that lake once I was past a year old, and she doesn't think I was more than ten or eleven months old the last time they went. Both science and my mother say I shouldn't (couldn't) remember something from that early in my life. Scientists would insist that I'd heard family stories, or seen pictures, and created a false memory for myself—and I'm familiar enough with how easy it is to create false memories to see how that could be so. The problem is I don't ever remember my family talking about those outings until I mentioned them many years later, "Remember when we used to go out on the raft? Where was that?"
"How do you know about that?" my mother asked, startled. I told her I remembered it. She said it couldn't be so.
If that isn't my earliest memory, then I just materialized one day when I was maybe four, playing by myself in the lovely green alcove between the front of my childhood home and the house which stood on the front of the property. This was my sacred combe, my favorite place in early childhood, always cool even on the hottest days, always the place of greenest, lushest grass, the high wall behind me covered in fragrant yellow climbing roses, the tall march of calla lilies along our house beside me, the other house tucked in on my other side. A small space, no more than ten feet square as I think back on it now, but a cozy, green place of dreams.
Reaching back for that memory, I can sort of see why some people believe in magic. Our consciousness just comes into being on a certain day, as if by some conjuration. The who that we are emerges from our instincts at that moment and starts marching forward through our personal history. But who were we before that? Why is it so misty and gone from our minds?
Oh yes, I'm well familiar with the science of consciousness, false memory, early memories and their explanations for these things. But for me, none of it can hold a bell, book, and candle to the mystery of who we are.
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