dagblog - Comments for "Speak, Memory"

Emma and Ramona: appreciate

artappraiser — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:46:33 +0000

Emma and Ramona: appreciate hearing from others who appreciate Oliver as much as I do.

Wonderful. This is why I

Ramona — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 15:32:00 +0000

Wonderful. This is why I tend to devour everything Oliver Sacks has to say. Whatever it is, it's just rich with story-telling and revelations and things I can almost always relate to. (I'm weird that way.)

I've been caught by relatives many times recounting my version of a story that is far different from theirs. As I'm telling it I believe with my whole heart and soul that that's the way it happened. I can see it. But if enough of them say it isn't so, it just isn't so.

When I was a columnist for a group of newspapers in suburban Detroit I wrote a column about kids and barns and in it I talked about watching Old Man Kilpela milk a cow, now and then squirting the milk toward the cat, who caught it in midair. I talked about the old man's hunched shoulders and veined hands and thinning white hair. I could see him as clearly at my desk as I had seen him through the barn door those many years ago. Except I never saw him. When my mother read my column she called me and said, "I don't know who you saw in that barn but it wasn't Old Man Kilpela. He went into the woods and shot himself long before you were born." (Another one of those deep, dark secrets only dragged out as needed.)

She went on to tell me that there hadn't been an old man in that barn since then and that it might have been Mrs. Kilpela, since she usually milked the cows (and was old). But I'm still seeing that old man.

Which is why I can both sympathize with and be terrified of unintentional plagiarism. The only thing that saves me, I think, is my inability to memorize complete sentences.

Great link. I especially

EmmaZahn — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 12:54:14 +0000

In reply to Speak, Memory

Great link. I especially liked his conclusion:

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.