Star Wars, Remembering and Forgetting

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Star Wars, Remembering and Forgetting

jackjuly:

‘In Tunisia, real-life nomads moved into a fictional slave village…One Tunisian ended up building his backyard chicken coop out of the domed “moisture evaporators” that supposedly made life in the deserts of Tatooine possible.’

-from Raiders of the Lost R2, an article by Jon Mooallem in Harper’s. The original Star Wars movies were shot all over the world—from the Tunisian desert to the California Redwoods. Following filming at each location, sets were simply abandoned: ‘Somewhere under the sand lay the actual relics of a fake, futuristic past…’ These relics are now the focus of the pilgrimage of Star Wars fans, who, growing older, have lost the ability to connect with the films through memorabilia.

Many neuroscientists would argue that the neurological changes which underlie a memory are permanent—that only our ability to access them changes; others are persuaded that through an un-permanence of an un-perfection of biological connectivity coupled with the remove of memory from experience and of memory from retelling, “remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. (from Mills, quoting Milan Kundera). Life is an epic translation. You are an omniglot.

But what underlies emotional memory, that is, what about the evocation of a memory simultaneously evokes an emotional response: why, when our ‘perceived’ memory resists fading or doesn’t, can its co-evoked emotion intensify or fade? Perhaps this is an indication of a place in which memory is less the imprint, the fossil, and more an active and intentional process, a self-teaching or unteaching, an adjustment in our self-translation: our memories become reinhabited like the futuristic past of Tattoine.

I’m reminded of Joyce’s post about the woman with near-perfect memory, unable to “translate” her story because she can only repeatedly relive the original. Remembering missing a childhood field trip, she helplessly feels “that same boundless disappointment and rage that [she] felt back then” all over again. The reporter wonders whether someone unable to forget, and unable to achieve any emotional distance from the things she is unable to forget, can ever fall in love. Memory and emotion: where neuroscience and philosophy intersect.

Relatedly, I really do need to get my hands on this month’s Harper’s.