Editing Memory

The New York Times reports today that scientists have made a breakthrough in editing memory, helping people to forget traumatic incidents, bad habits and more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html?_r=1&em

Release a drug to block several molecules, wipe out an engram.

I'm sure there will be a number of posts by people concerned about use of any such drug. And ethics will be a big concern, because my first thought about this is that really, there isn't anything I think I need to forget. But I have a laundry-list of things I'd like everyone else to forget.

That day in seventh grade, when I abruptly got my first period, while wearing white pants. That can go. I have a list of about forty-three people we (my flying monkey squad and I) need to visit to wipe that one out.

The entire two-day relationship with that guy who insisted we were "soul-mates" once the person I thought was a friend dumped him on me - literally. If we wipe that one out of the minds of the not-friend (different from an um-friend), all spectators, and the gentleman in question, he will be free to find his real soul-mate, in Australia, Tibet or Zimbabwe, having completely forgotten that abruptly forged supposed link and with no hypocrisy whatsoever in his new starry-eyed glomping.

The time the guy left me at a party and I coped by getting drunk, then climbing into the closet so no one would know I was drunk. I still don't know how they thought to look in the closet when they noticed I was gone, but really, the whole thing could go. Twenty people on the brain drug hit list and whammo, my universal lifetime reputation vastly improved.

The time the guy made fondue for our romantic date and it made me really sick and he left me to be cared for by my friend his roommate.  The roommate gets a pass for being a true friend.

Now, a lot of these things were twenty years ago now, and the vast majority of the witnesses have already forgotten me entirely, wouldn't recognize me now at all, or have moved into a witness protection program and are living in Antarctica dressed as penguins. But any time I think of running for political office, publishing anything with my real name, or being otherwise visible on the collective social radar, I think back and wonder how many people remember far too much about the person I once was to see clearly the person I now am. And somehow, someone showing up with a laundry list of pernicious details and dumb moves while dressed as a penguin seems more likely to damage my current reputation than even a more sensibly dressed witness might do.

I picture being on "This is Your Life" with a conga line of failed romantic endeavors and every one with its own series of embarrassments. Now, there is always a chance that people simply won't care. It's not as if I've ever hired a nanny under the table or accidentally listed $45,000 in charitable deductions on my tax returns. And, in fact, the majority of my friends who are about a decade younger than I visibly flinch at the very possibility of any personal revelation from younger and more foolish days, as if their own mother were about to tell them about some drunken hippie escapade. With tongue.  So I do have a cadre of protectors who would willingly picket the "This is Your Life" set with large sheets to ensure no one saw anything, largely to save their own senses of shock, horror and dismay at old people being juvenile delinquents. But so far, no sheet to drape over the lingering mental images of other old people who were young when I was young and whether more or less foolish than I, at least more sensible about giving out public ammunition.

So the flying monkeys and I are waiting until this thing is widely available, and will be wiping out selective references to "vomit," "soul mates" and "seventh grade." We think this will really be a general public service with widespread benefits, although we have a personal interest in the matter.

It goes in cycles

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/wl_uk_afp/britainusliteraturesuicide

Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.

For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.

Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.

Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.