The Archive 'pullout'
2.2 Concern / celebration
11
HOW TO REMEMBER
when they have finally come to terms with it, they want to remember every detail about the person who died - their face, the sound of their voice, their scent, the happy times spent together. But a poor memory lets them down.
Time travel can't bring people back to life, but it can animate memories and preserve scenes for posterity far better than any photo album.
I am also about to use it with someone who has lost her memory through an accident. Bit by bit, we hope to re-create her past, sketching rough outlines before filling them in with colour.
THE TECHNIQUE
Start by returning to a location that conjures up a number of varied, incidental recollections: your old school, an old friend's house you used to visit, or a vil-lage you left long ago.
Choose a specific starting point: it might be a flagpole in the playground, a chapel pew, a treehut, a friend's kitchen. Look around you. What little inci-dents do you remember? How old were you then? What friends did you have?
What were the typical noises? Traffic, trains, children playing?
Try to recall individual sounds characteristic of particular objects: the slam of a front door, a squeaky window, a creaky floorboard, a waterpipe that always shuddered. See if you can recall voices, even their timbre. If you are using your old school as a location, try to remember catchphrases used by teachers and pupils. Isolate particular events that took place, no matter how trivial they seem now. They obviously meant something to you then.
Use all your senses. Can you recall the smell of a damp, musty room, or the aroma of your garden? And what about the smooth feel of a polished walnut table, or the rough texture of a pebbledash wall, the one you used to run your hands along on the way to school.
Association is at the heart of time travel. One memory sparks off another.
After a while, an overall picture begins to emerge, not just of the physical lay-out but also of your state of mind. Were you happy? Optimistic? In love?
Depressed? Naive?
The deeper you reflect, the more memories will be triggered off.
Experiences completely forgotten will come flooding back. Eventually, if you work at it, you will have the same problem as I have now: I never run out of memories.
DAILY ROUTINE
Spend a little time every day reflecting on the same area of your past until you feel you have exhausted every avenue of retrieval. It's possible you never will.
Every time you return to the scene, you will be starting with a clearer, more comprehensive picture. It's a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle: each detail
adds something to the overall image. Don't be surprised if you move the pieces around, making corrections in matters of detail.
I have just had to alter the layout in my parent's back garden. One morning I realized that a certain cherry tree I had recently 'rediscovered' had, in fact, been chopped down years ago. I suddenly recalled the sensation of tripping over its stump and stubbing my toe. In turn, that reminded me of our next-door neighbour - someone I had completely forgotten - and his tantrum when the tree crashed through his fence.
How far back can you go? I can recall shaking the wooden bars of my cot, aged two. My mother predicted that I would be a boxer one day, given the way I was developing my infantile biceps. She wasn't far wrong. I did get a pair of boxing gloves for my tenth birthday.
OTHER BENEFITS
Time travel borders on self-hypnosis, but it comes with no health warnings and you won't need the click of someone's fingers to wake you. When I relax in my sauna of early childhood memories, I adopt the same frame of mind I had all those years ago: carefree, innocent, untroubled. Only then do I realize how much my expectations and opinions have changed.
Time travel has many other benefits. One common symptom of people who don't know how to use their memories is the failure to recall dreams. It is non-sense to say that we don't dream. We all do, every night. It is the brain's way of filing away the thoughts it has had during the day. By exercising your memory regularly, you will begin to recall more and more dreams. (You might even have more wild and untamed dreams! No promises, though.)
Finally, you may wish to use the findings of your archaeological dig for one of your journeys. When I memorized five packs of cards, I needed thirty-five routes, many of them taken from my childhood.