What is memory?
“The imagination is kind of electronic machine that takes into account of all the possible combinations and chooses the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose, or are simply the most interesting, pleasing, or amusing.”—from Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
What is memory and imagination? Are our memories real, or are they made up of images from all of the media we’ve taken in and mixed up with our actual memories, and then filtered by some algorithm in our brain?
On June 25 of this year, my wife text me and asked me when Michael Jackson died… Apparently, it was a question on a radio station’s contest. My answer was the same as always: June of 2010.
Why? Because my wife and I met then at our low residency MFA program (Antioch Los Angeles) and we were on Venice Beach when it happened. We both remember all of the radios and boom boxes changing to The King of Pop’s songs right at the same time and we knew exactly what happened: “Oh, Michael Jackson must have just died,” I said.
But, that’s not true at all. He died June 25, 2009. A year before I was at Antioch, a year before we met. So what actually happened in 2010? I have no idea. I DISTINTCLY remember this happening: Venice, Natasha, the little curio shops, the cacophony of Jackson songs…
The only explanation is that it was the one year anniversary of his death and the L.A. radio stations switched over at the same time, kicking off a waterfall of his music flooding the Venice strip. And that we commented on it being the one year anniversary. Maybe. Or we confused by it being the anniversary because we’re both disconnected from pop culture and missed his death the year before (unlikely, because I remember the news coverage about the doctor and so on). A rip in the Matrix that accidently put us together for a moment one year before we met?
Who knows? But, I like our version the best: we had just met, we were wandering the Venice strip, Michael died, and we were there right when everyone switched to his music. That is the version we will tell.