my (lacking) memory

People who know me well know better than to ask me the plot of a movie, book, or play, if it has been months or years since I've seen/read it. For some reason my brain doesn't hold on to narrative. I'm not sure what's wrong with me. I can tell you whether or not it was a good movie, book, or play, and whether or not I liked it. I can recall how it made me feel. Who was in it? Maybe. (You know, that guy who was in that other movie, with that other guy where they, uh... oh forget it.) What exactly happens in it? No clue. A vague remeniscence of the general subject matter, ok, probably, but actual plot? Never. Not unless I've seen it over and over again. Sure I can tell you the story of the Wizard of Oz, but only because I've seen it a zillion times.

I say my brain doesn't hold on to the plot, but that's not exactly accurate. More than once, I've rented a movie that I've already seen. I've even read the summary feeling fairly certain that I'd never seen it, but in the first few minutes of the film, a light bulb goes on. The synapses connect, and an overwhelming "oh yeah!" feeling brings the whole story flooding back to me. It's as though the information is tucked away, but I just can't get at it. It's frustrating at times, but nothing I can't live with.

Take, for example, "Gone With The Wind." I know I loved it, I know it's about the Civil War, I know Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are in love, and that he's a soldier, that he goes and comes back, and "Frankly... I don't give a damn." What doesn't he give a damn about? Not sure. I know Tara, the plantation, burns. I know a thing or two about Hattie McDaniel. I know Scarlett has some kind of "let's worry about it tomorrow" thing going on. This is actually quite a bit more than I can remember about most movies, which is next to nothing, but still I can't say what happens, in what sequence, or retrieve the details from my mind. I haven't seen it for several years, but I know if I saw it tonight, it would all come back to me during the first scene.

This weekend I stored several more narratives in my memory banks, wondering as I always do, "Will I remember this in a week? A month? A year?" How can I stop losing this information, or at least, losing the pathways that let me unlock the information that just sits there? This weekend I saw a play, "Eurydice", three movies: "Mon meilleur ami", "The Fan", and "Sicko", and I finished one book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. I don't really have the time or the desire to keep notes about these stories. I wish I could talk intelligently about them a year from now, but I don't know if it will be possible! ("The Fan" was worth forgetting, but the others were good, and "Sicko" was great.)

Is it from the countless hours I spent watching terrible TV sitcoms as a kid, that kind of vegetating I did in front of the tube where the brain is virtually turned off? How many times did I go to the kitchen to get a snack during a commercial, and not even remember what it was I had been watching? Of course all those Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island and Bewitched episodes are also stored away, somewhere beside the Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieslowski films, just next to the Vonnegut novels, and behind various musicals, plays, and operas I've seen over the years. I guess there's some comfort in knowing they're somewhere in there.