Trying to Sleep and Learning to Forget.

There you are lying on the bed, unable to sleep, your head is filled with remorse, sadnesses, regrets, baleful memories.

Is it possible to erase memories?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) advocates argue that it is possible to control memory. What you do is try to imagine the thing you are remembering as a sequence of images, like a film. Then you practise speeding up this "film footage" in your mind, viewing it over and over at greater and greater speed until finally it is nothing but a rapid blur and then disappears.

I tried this with the hectoring face of a former boss but I didn't manage to earse them from my mind.

Some advise "just don't think about it" as a method of dealing with unpleasant thoughts, as if experiencing a thought is like seeing something, and all you have to do is turn your head for it not to appear in your minds eye.

I wonder if the people capable of that have ever experienced anything really unpleasant or if they are so simple minded that when they think of one thing, all other thoughts disappear (I recall here F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function)?

Another school of thought (which extends into cognitive psychotherapy) argues in the opposite direction, believing that memories cannot be erased and should be seen as resources. In this school of thought the memory of my appalling boss would be used as the basis of a series of discussions. We would discuss what I might learn about myself from the memory, and how I might gain from the knowledge it brought me about conflict situations, choices, my sense of responsibility to myself and so forth.

I tried reasoning how the memory might be useful to me: a warning about how to stand up to bullies, for instance, but the truth is that I could find no lesson. I dealt with that dreadful woman fairly well: she showed me that having a boss is an appalling business. But it did not really need emphasing - only a masochist could desire a situation where their every movement is clocked, where they are scolded for arriving at their desks a moment late, or where the clothing they wear is monitered.

You don't need to eat shit to know it tastes bad: I resign myself to the accepting the uselessness of that memory and that my tossing and turning are in vain and regret the failure of NLP to have helped me erase it.

What does seem to have happened though is that the memory simply fades. So what I think might help make this fading process more efficient is to avoid the triggers that sustain specific memories, so that more recent experiences and memories can more easily obscure the old.

Memory of a Lady

You live in an apartment, one that is full of beautiful objects such as flowers in vases or nail scissors with golden handles, or a string of pearls draped round a porcelain hand designed specifically for that purpose.

That is one of the things I like about you, your jewelry and your many many things and the way they sit on your Regency dressing table which your grandmother once owned. They reflect in the oval mirror and they reflect on the deep polish of the table too in way that is sad and true like a poem should be.

When I am standing in your room and I watch you apply cream to your hands I think of how, when we are separated (as seems inevitable) and whatever anguish I feel over this has dissipated, I shall feel a tremendous sense of missing that sight- you applying cream.

I shall sometimes see myself standing there while you are so engaged. How must I have seemed to you: dense, ponderous? Did you consider me as a lost soul, beyond hope? I believe that yours was a more practical turn of mind. You were efficient, not necessarily at ease, but capable, seemingly without perversity.

My life, by contrast, was weighed down, opaque. When you asked me how I felt I could not say; I stammered. I was pent up, so full of emotions. I could never understand why you liked me.

I felt inferior to you but that wasn't why I didn’t ask you what you thought of me. I didnt ask you what you thought of me because you did not seem truly to have the need to discover anything about me at all and because I could not in a few words tell you my secrets.

Witchery

IN relation to this series of photos two things come to mind- how Charles Manson urged his followers to create "witchy" objects using found items when they went on their killing spree. He is and was totally mad, of course, but it it hard to deny the aesthetic force of his imagery. This, much more than his ideas explains his enduring interest.

The second though that comes to mind is the memory of an afternoon spent twenty years ago at The Glen in Innerleithan, near Peebles, Scotland with Mark Haddon and others making sculptures out of bits and pieces of twig, the idea being that these sculptures should be so subtle that they are almost not discernible as sculptures at all- they lay at the interface between art and nature.

Regarding that memory, isn't it funny how time "telescopes" so some events or conversations are as fresh in the mind as if they happened yesterday, while others, ostensibly more serious fade (my first marriage, for instance, which I never give a moments thought to)?