[click for On the Road with Phil Freshman]
Lauren Gravitz writes that autobiographical memories “begin to take lasting form in a part of the brain called the hippocampus…Neurons communicate with each other through synapses — junctions between these cells that include a tiny gap across which chemical messengers can be sent…Through a process known as synaptic plasticity, neurons constantly produce new proteins to remodel parts of the synapse…This creates a network of cells that, together, encode a memory…Over time, and through consistent recall, the memory becomes encoded in both the hippocampus and the cortex. Eventually, it exists independently in the cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage.” [Nature]
My brain can’t wrap itself around the miracles executed by the billions of entities in its tiny space any more than it can comprehend the enormity of the Milky Way—or the design and construction of equipment depicting the infinitesimal and the infinite.
Fortunately my brain can immediately grasp “As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar” (from Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata). I’d love to see how my synapses sparkled when I first read this.
Some writers are blessed with great memories. Thomas Wolfe could remember watching his sister climb a hill on her way to school when he was 18 months old. He put that memory into Look Homeward, Angel. Also in Angel, he describes “the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit” in the boarding house based on the one his family ran in Asheville (where he hadn’t been in many years). I saw that bed. Sure enough, “round medals of clustering fruit” are painted gaily on it.
A flawed memory is not a fatal flaw; sometimes it can be an advantage. Filling a memory gap with invented truth may produce something more interesting—and appropriate to the story—than the actual experience. Even when attempting a faithful rendering of the past, we fall prey to imprecision. You can tell the truth about all you remember, but all you remember may not be the truth. In his preface to Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, W.B. Yeats writes: “I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge.”
My neurons and synapses were kept hopping in my medial prefrontal cortex (among other areas) while living through, remembering, writing about, re-remembering, and revising “On the Road with Phil Freshman.” The piece as a whole relies on good-faith fidelity to experience, but, as William Maxwell writes in his autobiographical short story “Billie Dyer”: “For things that are not known—at least not anymore—and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.”
In the working manuscript for Based on a True Life (where this piece will reside), I have changed names to protect people from the flaws of my memory and the hops of my fancy. But I could not bear to change Phil Freshman, so I tracked him down (not difficult—he is a well-known editor; currently president of the Association of Art Editors).
Phil took issue with both his entrance (“he replies with a wry smile that his most recent job was shoveling chickens for Colonel Sanders”) and exit: “I go everywhere, I do everything, and I never have any fun.”
About Colonel Sanders, he wrote that he “never worked in one of those places. But again, this is memoir and not history.” I appreciated the allowance Phil made for memoir, but I was puzzled because by then “shoveling chickens” was firmly ensconced in my cortex. I responded, “Hmmmm—very interesting. Why would my memory make up the phrase ‘shoveling chickens’? Is it at all possible that it was something you might have said though not true?” Phil threw me a bone in his reply: “Yes, I suppose I could have said it, just to create an image. I've been known to do such things, and my wife rolls her eyes heavily whenever I do.”
Phil checked in with my cousin, Ellen (real name), who confirmed the broad strokes: “He [Alan] definitely went to Oregon and I do remember getting off in some small town around Mendocino? but don't recall any of the other details. I have some impression that you [Phil] were there, but it's been a long time!!! He had enough specific memories that even if he didn't get some details right, I'm sure he had felt a real connection with you or you wouldn't have been immortalized in this way.”
Phil responded by contributing to the memory quest. “I'm wondering if the town with the drug store was (is) Ferndale. Tiny town filled with gemlike Victorians. Houses, that is.”
Ellen also contacted her long-ago boyfriend, whose cortex was bereft of the whole deal. “I don’t even remember a cousin of Ellen’s—let alone the trip to Oregon he narrates.” But he did confirm the one detail I would have removed without verification—his stepfather “did fight with the partisans in Northern Italy during WWII.”
And what about Phil Freshman’s cherished farewell, “I go everywhere, I do everything, and I never have any fun”? Before I contacted Phil, I realized he might have been quoting someone, and I found a 1936 cartoon (The CooCoo Nut Grove) with the words coming from the animated mouth of an actor playing Ned Sparks, linked here: Ned Sparks caricature
(Ned Sparks in Magic Town)
But I was foiled again by Phil: “To my knowledge, I had never heard of Ned Sparks before reading your piece. This was mentally confirmed when I looked at the YouTube bit…and felt absolutely no memory tug.”
The only memory tug that I feel is Phil Freshman on that August night in Berkeley a half century ago. The memory remains a mystery; the story will remain the same.
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