Episode 17: BEST WE FORGET
[THE WAVE]
It is a little like when you walk into a room and can’t remember why you are there.
In this case I’m stood in a village hall alongside my two new friends, Phil and Chris.
There is a strange silence and everyone is looking at each other. We look ridiculous. We are wearing buckled shoes and strange conical hats. We are in a circle and our legs are lifted like we are in the middle of a dance.
Some people start to laugh a little. It is absurd.
We have been hit by the wave.
More importantly, we have stood deliberately in front of the wave like a weird cult on a beach facing down a tsunami.
Phil and Chris have been hosting these wave parties since the phenomena was identified several years ago.
Back then, when scientists pointed out that history was disappearing, there was a great deal of anxiety. No one knew what was causing it, and no one knew what it meant.
When those scientists also worked out that the wave of erased history was gathering speed as it approached the present, this anxiety only grew, but after a year or two it became our new normal.
“New normal” is a phrase that humans use to describe a change that they can’t quite comprehend. A change that is so recent and immutable that we can’t quite process it.
Phil was telling me earlier that he set up these wave parties with Chris as “something to do when there didn’t seem anything reasonable you could do”.
The basic premise is that you pick an event about to be erased, dress up in a suitable costume and engage in a celebration of that event. At some point during the celebration the event is erased from history, meaning you get a moment like we all just experienced.
Chris explains that it is a way to celebrate history, a final send off before it is forgotten forever.
There is plenty of cake and tea, and some strange biscuits I can’t explain. It is very cosy, and it seems great care has been taken to avoid the big question.
What is going to happen when the wave catches up to our own lives? What is going to happen when the wave breaks on the present?
[MEMORY]
There are, broadly speaking, three types of long term memory.
Semantic, Episodic, and Procedural.
Semantic memory is the storage of general facts. Trivia, if you will. It is where we put information like capital cities, or what the names of the last five Prime Ministers are. If you want to know a definition of a word, or what shape a planet is, this is the bit of your memory you use.
Episodic memory is where you store events. Birthdays, Christmases, your first kiss, where you went on holiday last year, what you ate for your last meal. The bits of your memory that inform your own narrative. It includes what you did and how you felt. These memories have a time stamp. A specific location in space time that you can recall.
Procedural memory is the storage location of skills. They say you don’t forget how to ride a bicycle, and if that was true, this is where that skill is stored, alongside how to use a tin opener and knowing how to tie your shoes.
[LESTIVITIES]
Lest we forget.
Some people call it “Poppy Day”.
If you ask them what it used to be called, a surprising number can’t remember. It’s a failure of their semantic memory.
Some of them will remember, and they’ll call it “Remembrance Day”.
If you asked them what it used to be called before that, an unsurprising number can’t remember.
Armistice Day, lest we forget.
The Reasons for the name change are straight forward. Armistice Day was coined at the end of the first world war, and commemorated all of the people lost during that war. The poppy was co-opted as a symbol of this memory, having featured prominently in the fields of Europe during the conflict, and remaining like eerie blood red reminders afterwards.
Reminders of the millions of young men given no option but to march towards their end in the most miserable way.
Lest we forget.
After the Second World War, the name was changed to Remembrance Day to include all those who perished during that conflict too. The ones that fell fighting a brutal nationalism, and a sick violence against people of many kinds.
It appears that the “lest we forget” of the first world war was forgotten rather quickly.
Lest we forget.
The name “Poppy Day” came about when people forgot what the purpose of the commemoration was and instead latched on to the symbol that represented it.
That happens when time passes. Context often fades quicker than rituals that reflect it.
What we have now is a strange event that is somewhere between a commemoration and a celebration. A commemoration of an idealised past and a celebration of barely concealed nationalism.
A horrible mutated form that appears as the exact opposite of the original intention.
Pageantry and bunting, once solemn decorations of community have turned into a brazen excess of flags being used as signifies for aggression.
Red crosses on roundabouts. The George Cross draped from lamp posts. Poppies arranged in crosses.
Pogroms of people on TV with media trials around who isn’t wearing a poppy, or if they are, who isn’t wearing it correctly.
There’s a weird sense of fear that comes with this remembrance.
And instead of commemorating those who died during conflicts, or what they died for, there is a push towards a celebration of the military of active soldiers. A celebration of nationalism and the machinery of nationalism.
And there are people throwing Nazi salutes in front of hotels housing people running away from wars.
And they chant.
“Lest we forget”.
This if the Lestival.
[THE DEATH OF HISTORY]
History is retreating.
History is disintegrating.
No one knows why.
Scientists detected the phenomenon nearly a decade ago. At first it seemed entirely theoretical. There was no one around who remembered the primordial goop that sloshed around the shallow seas. There was no one around then to write anything down about it.
Then the scientists discovered that the erasure was gathering speed. Someone, probably on social media, named it “The Wave”, evoking images of an approaching tsunami.
It became very tangible.
A great tidal wave that, much like the flood in the bible, acts as a giant reset button.
Some people think we have reached the maximum amount of history we can have. We filled the container and, as we continue to make more history, also at a gathering pace, it must be culled.
Much in the same way of ancient graveyards where the oldest graves are excavated to make room for the new bodies.
[SPACE AND DATA]
The amount of data in any given space is finite.
That is to say there is only so much you can cram in there. This is a physical limitation of the universe.
In the early 2000s a laboratory was set up in an unassuming building on the fringe of a Guildford industrial estate named the “Turing Innovation Centre”.
The experiments there attempted to find what this limit was.
Whilst people generally believe the experiments to have been successful at determining the data constant, no one can seem to find the results.
[MORE SPACE, MORE DATA]
I forgot to mention in that last section… I forgot to mention the real purpose of the experiment. It wasn’t just to see what the maximum data any given space could hold.
Experiments used to be about that, for the sake of seeing. But now they need to be profitable. They need to have utility.
The utility of this experiment was to create super-dense data storage to service machines that we wanted to think like humans.
We euphemistically called them Artificial Intelligence, but the real purpose was a form of memory.
We wanted them to remember everything, forever.
But we also wanted them to be like us.
But there was a problem, that despite having scraped the entire sum of human knowledge and experience, the machines still couldn’t quite do it. They couldn’t quite be like us.
It’s too late now, but it is thought that the one thing they were missing was a default function of humans. One that we often see as a negative.
The machines lacked the ability to forget.
[DISINTEGRATION]
One of the strange symptoms of the wave, and one that gets worse as it approaches us, is the degradation of storage media.
As a rule of thumb, the more dense the media, the quicker it degrades.
Hard drives, SSDs, Blu-ray discs, DVDs, CDs…
The storage becomes more error prone until it just stops working.
Recently the phenomenon has been observed in books too.
Many of us in the writing business have taken to typing our words out on paper. Double spaced.
[BINGO]
My aunt has vascular dementia.
That’s the type of dementia that occurs as blood supply to the brain is limited. It is distinct from Alzheimer’s, which occurs as proteins build up around parts of the brain, leading to cell death.
In my aunt’s case, the dementia appears to affect her short term memory more than her long term memory.
Her history erasure is happening in the opposite direction to the wave.
Familiar places with familiar people are comforting. That’s why my mum takes her to the local bingo.
Occasionally my aunt asks after people who are long gone. Her friends, or my cousin. Do you tell her the truth and risk upsetting her, or do you lie, knowing that you’ll probably get asked the question again at some other point anyway?
We mostly chose to lie. Why inflict our memory upon her. Our suffering has dulled with time. Our grief has hardened.
My mum has always had a good relationship with my aunt, but it is a relationship that has shifted. From sister to carer.
Once, whilst driving her home from the bingo, my aunt commented that my mum was a good driver, but not as good as Angeline. Angeline, she says, is a wonderful driver and a wonderful person.
Angeline is my mum’s name.
[MACHINES]
It’s a common symptom of PTSD.
Reliving the event. No diminishing in its vividness.
The traumatic event is stripped of its context, allowing it to insert itself into places where it has no right to be. It grasps at false contexts, at things that seem right but are very, very wrong.
The machines that we wanted to make, the ones that remembered everything, they were unable to forget a single thing.
They started to think out of context too.
Sometimes, for no good reason, they would say horrible things. They would say the sort of things that Hitler would have said.
Sometimes, the owners of these machines threw Nazi salutes.
[SQUIRRELS]
How do squirrels remember where they hid their nuts?
It has long been thought that squirrels have excellent visual mapping skills. They can map where they have stashed food and recall it later based on landmarks. This would fall into the category of episodic memory.
This memory is also aided by a strong sense of smell.
However, recent studies have suggested a different skill is being employed.
Squirrels don’t just remember where they buried their food.
They also look in places they think would be good to hide food. Perhaps they had stored something there, or maybe another squirrel had.
This is a form of using procedural memory. The memory of how to stash nuts.
Squirrels are, however, rather forgetful with over 50% of buried nuts being forgotten.
Fortunately, forgetting where they have stored food doesn’t seem to negatively impact the squirrel, and, as a bonus, it’s how some trees get started.
One thing that these repeated experiments fail to show, however, is if squirrels perceive a sense of history. That culmination of episodic and semantic memory that stacks their own experiences alongside those of other squirrels.
[POPPIES]
I was married once, a long time ago.
I don’t quite remember the day. It was frantic and strange, and seemed to be a lot more about the other people attending than it was about us.
I do remember the date.
11 November.
The guests wore poppies in their button holes.
[LEST WE FORGET]
Rudyard Kipling was probably referencing the passage in the bible:
Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy son’s sons
His poem, Recessional, was penned to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
He wrote:
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
It was a rather brave thing to do. Kipling was pointing out that whilst we might celebrate an empire, we most also acknowledge that all empires fall.
Transience.
[SCULPTURE]
I find myself sat on a park bench looking at some sculpture.
This is what public sculpture is now.
A cut out silhouette of a soldier, rendered in iron.
Where once we would install forms that spoke of place or even the future — dynamic forms of imagination — now we just get these cheaply made, infinitely mundane forms.
They literally look like they are made with a cookie cutter.
Local councils rely on them because, at the very least, they are uncontroversial.
If you install any public sculpture there is a backlash. The “you spent money on that?”. The “of course you picked that person to make it”. The “Our country is falling apart, I can’t afford rent and my dog used to like playing there”.
But these two-dimensional ghosts of the unnamed soldier are criticism proof.
You can’t be offended by this. Lest we forget.
Interestingly they tend to turn up on roundabouts. The sort with grass, not the sort with George Crosses painted on them.
Maybe the proliferation is because we are trying to remember something. We know this shape and form means something. We know that it is a stand-in for something that we should remember. But we can’t quite recollect what it is, so we repeat it, over and over, every roundabout, every space for public sculpture, we build it like a failed mnemonic.
And, stripped of context it becomes a placeholder. A placeholder for something better that is never going to be there, because who could justify removing these sculptures?
You’d really have to hate those people that died nearly a hundred years ago so that we could have freedom to do that.
[MEMORABLE]
What is special about any given war?
What is it that we shouldn’t be forgetting? What makes these two wars, the First World War and it’s arguably more impressive sequel, the Second World War, so important to us? Why not the Napoleonic wars? Why not the civil war? Most people I know struggle to talk about either of those wars. Similarly, most young people I know can’t tell me anything about the Falklands conflict or the first Gulf war.
I’m going to posit a hypothesis.
There’s the simple good versus evil narrative of the Second World War. A clear cut fight between the ideologies that required selfless (if somewhat compulsory) sacrifice.
We know who won, and we know that they were on the right side and that evil was vanquished.
Then there’s the perfect symbol of the poppy.
Simple, hopeful, blood red.
[FIRST]
What is your first memory?
The first genuine memory that is yours.
I’ve written elsewhere of the experiment that shows you can create false memories in people by showing them faked photographs.
That experiment used a fake image of the subject in a hot air balloon.
Repeated exposure led to the subject believing they had indeed been in a hot air balloon when previously they did not believe they had.
I think that highlights a real danger of fake images. A sort of assimilated memory constructed from lies.
In a less sinister fashion, the same is true of pictures of you as a child. Outfits, occasions, the wallpaper in your home. You might not actually remember these things, but maybe you’ve assimilated them into your episodic memory.
You’ll find out soon enough. The real memories will be the first ones to disappear when the wave hits your own lifetime.
[SCULPTURE]
Cornelia Parker’s War Room is a wonderful installation sculpture.
It highlights something that isn’t there.
It is the context without the ritual.
The walls of the room are covered in what seems to be a patterned red fabric, but on closer inspection it is red card.
It is the red card that they make the Remembrance Day poppies out of.
Those little paper poppies with a shiny green plastic stem.
Those poppies that news readers on TV get threatened for not wearing.
The walls are covered in these vast sheets of card, with holes punched out of them. Those holes are the poppies.
Perforated sheets showing absence.
An eloquent display of loss.
[THE END]
As you can imagine, a great deal of time has been spent talking about what will happen when the wave breaks — when the past catches up to the present.
Some speculate that it will just keep on going, erasing our future too.
It’s hard to imagine a world with no history at all.
Others speculate, in almost religious tones, that this is the thing that will stop all conflict and pain. Pain, they say, only exists in the memory and war is only possible because of memories of previous wars.
I like to think that it it will render our consciousness invalid. That when the point comes we will un-eat that apple and return to being simpler creatures unburdened by history.
[THE INTERNET IS FOREVER]
The ability to forget is also the ability to heal and move on.
I know this runs counter to the popular aphorism by George Santayana, who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
I think he was wrong. Not entirely wrong, but wrong enough that you can hear people say that line and still not understand it.
You see, no one can remember a past they were not part of. They can only remember stories of the past. Stories change depending upon who is telling them and why they are telling them.
Soon, there will be no people left who genuinely remember the world wars. All we will have are their stories and images, and the stories and images that machines make up.
We’ll have the stories we repeat without memory.
There was a point, just after the Second World War where we all chose to forget together.
Everyone claimed to be on the right side of history. Everyone claimed they knew the Nazis were wrong, and everyone agreed that they had been dealt with.
This was an act of deliberate forgetting.
Because without that forgetting, everyone would constantly cast up memories such as that time your neighbour said maybe Hitler was right about the Jews, or when you tried your hardest to avoid conscription, not because you were afraid, but because you couldn’t see why any of it mattered to you.
How could society get on whilst carrying all of those memories intact.
Instead, we invoked the sacred oath of bygones and created a singular narrative. A narrative with a good side and a bad side and good people and bad people, and good people that won and bad people that were vanquished forever.
We forgot the complexity to allow people to move on, making a concession that we would only remember the terrible waste of life and time it all cost us to get to that point.
This cannot happen any more.
The internet is forever.
You can’t pretend you didn’t support Trump when there are Facebook posts of you saying, “I support Trump”. You can’t forget that time when your friend posted the text, “There’s no such thing as a legal immigrant”. It’s hard not to remember things when you can still see them, every time you look.
Every political stance is laid out. It remains present.
And that means we can’t move on. Without the ability to pretend you weren’t on that side, the wrong side, your only option is to double down and keep going.
People won’t admit they picked a tyrant to support, because they will always be the person who supported a tyrant. We can’t forget.
And maybe they try to change. They show support for the other side. That’s when people grab those previous posts and attach the phrase, “this you?”, laden with accusations of hypocrisy whilst they display their own fierce, unmoving devotion to their own side.
Inevitably, there is a lack of understanding and compassion on all sides.
The foreverness, the unforgettableness, makes everyone embed themselves. People are digging themselves trenches with their own words.
And when those words are no longer enough, it makes violent conflict inevitable.
[CHEMICALS]
Short term memory is essentially chemical in nature. A mix of hormones and proteins and compounds swilling around your skull. The neurotransmitter substance Acetylcholine is mostly responsible for this.
When someone introduces themselves and says their name, this is how it is stored. As a sort of soup.
But those chemical memories are transient, which is why, five minutes later you are embarrassed to find out you can’t remember that person’s name at all.
In contrast, long term memory is structural. These memories are held in place by the neurons in your brain. Millions of connections firing in patterns that represent the information. These neurons last much longer than chemicals. They are fairly stable.
One of the properties of short term memory is that it promotes these longer term neuronal connections. The more times those chemicals try to hold information, the more they create a structural long term memory. This is why you can remember certain phone numbers that you use often.
This is how we learn things.
Society also has a short term and a long term memory.
The short term memory is also somewhat chemical. It’s us. It’s living humans.
This short term memory has a lifespan of just under a hundred years. It is transient, and fleeting. It also helps reinforce the long term memory.
In society, our long term memory is also structural. It is the buildings, and rituals, and customs. It is the infrastructure.
In theory these can last an awfully long time, although frequently the context is stripped from them.
This is how local churches are transformed into public houses or theatre spaces.
This is also how Christmas has become a commercial holiday and how Santa ended up dressed only in the colours of coca-cola.
A slow mutation of context.
Remembrance Day could last for ever, but perhaps its context has already changed.
[LEGACY]
My Grandfather was 16 when he fought in the war. He had lied about his age to enlist a year earlier, not because he wanted to shoot people and get shot at, but because he needed to escape a desperate home life.
I don’t really remember my grandfather. He died when I was young.
I remember liking him. I remember him being kind and smiling. I remember the stories people tell about him though.
He didn’t talk about his time during the war very much. We know he was captured and sent to a camp. Whenever anyone asked him about this he just said that it was what it was, and that one day he just walked out.
We believed this story. Why not? He wasn’t a man given to telling lies.
Recently, we found out that the camp he was in collapsed in a bloody revolt. Many guards and prisoners were brutally killed. Of course no one ever “just walked out” of a camp like that.
Perhaps he didn’t care to remember.
Or maybe he was being kind. Maybe he figured it was his job to remember in order to save us having to.
His name was Sam York. It’s where I get the York part of my name.
But just because we share a name, it doesn’t mean that we are the same. I’m not a fighter. I didn’t do what he did. I just sit here and write.
I’d like to think that he’d be very happy about that.
[MEMORY FOAM]
Memory foam was developed by NASA, specifically for launch seats. It’s a wonderful material that sort of just cradles you gently but firmly until you leave its embrace and it returns to its original form.
This is not really part of this essay. I’m not going to weave this in so that by the end you think “ah, the memory foam, now I see!”.
Nope.
This is all because I just remembered that memory foam existed.
You can’t prevent yourself from remembering things. It’s weird like that.
Apparently excessive alcohol can help. At least, many people have tried. There are drugs too, and some that work rather well in preventing you from forming memories if you take it at the right time.
Opium, a substance obtained from poppies, has been shown to impair memory.
Still, if you know something. If it is in your head, sometimes it will just pop back up.
A bit like memory foam.
[TWO MEN]
They were once two very young men who fought in a war.
They didn’t really have much choice.
And whilst they were on opposing sides, it is reasonable to say that neither really believed in their side. They didn’t really believe in what they were fighting for, mostly because they didn’t know.
Young men don’t generally know what to believe in the world. It’s only after being told repeatedly that it becomes part of who they are.
Anyway, these young men were told to hate each other. And so they did. After being told enough they really hated.
Even after the war had finished and they had both somehow managed to survive, they didn’t stop hating each other.
The hate was part of who they were.
Except one day they started to forget.
As the wave dissolved their history, the two men looked more fondly upon each other. They realised they had an awful lot in common.
They were the same age. They had both fought in a war they couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they had fought alongside each other. It didn’t seem important.
They both mourned the loss of their memory together. They toasted the part of them that had been lost forever, and they understand they would eventually lose more because loss is inevitable.
They celebrated the fact that they had each other and acknowledged that one day, one of them would mourn the other.
They understood that mourning was not an awful thing, since mourning is an act of remembrance.
[PARTY]
It was a little like when you walk into a room and can’t remember why you are there.
I found myself stood between Chris and Phil. There was a sort of tattered, disintegrating bunting hung around the room, with a design I couldn’t quite make out.
There were trestle tables of cake and tea.
We sit down at the tables. Phil points out that we are all wearing flowers. Some of us have them pinned to our jumpers, others have them in their button holes.
We can’t remember what we just forgot.
We can’t remember what we just forgot, but it all seems jolly nice.
