Writing and Remembering

published in Write or Die magazine

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Written By Marianne Janack

I. Plato’s Socrates tells the following story, which he says comes from “the Ancients”:

“In the Egyptian city of Naucritus there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation; geometry, astronomy, and games of with dice. But his great discovery was the use of letters. Theuth tried to convince Thamus, the king of Egypt, to adopt his system of letters.”

“‘This’ Theuth told Thamus, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser, and give them better memories. It is an aid to both memory and wit.’”

II. Before I went to London for six months in 1985—this was when I was twenty—I begged my mother to write to me. “We’ll see,” she said, “you know I don’t like to write.”

That was true. She would ask my sister or me to copy down recipes on little index cards when she came upon a recipe in Good Housekeeping that she liked, or when we’d visited an aunt or cousin who had made something appealing and unusual. Chocolate Cake made with Mayonnaise; Ambrosia Salad; Cake Doughnuts; Cabbage Casserole made with cabbage, zucchini, Stovetop Stuffing, and Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup.

She said her handwriting was illegible. That was true, too. She preferred neatly written recipes. So we dutifully copied recipes onto recipe cards, index cards, pieces of blue-lined white paper:

Homemade Macaroni and Cheese

Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast

Rhubarb Muffins

Three Hole Cake

Banana Cake

III. Socrates, in The Phaedrus:

“I have the feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the appearance of life and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence …And when a speech has been written down it can be tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not; and if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them, and they cannot protect or defend themselves.”

IV. Writing, 21st Century

The Drama of the Everyday

Dramatis Personae:

John Adams: age 71, home alone in upstate New York while his wife is away at a writing program. He is a Vietnam vet, newly retired from his job as a debate instructor. He is generally not very good at being alone.

Marianne Janack: his wife, 54 years old, attending a writing program 300 miles away for a week; worried about John being home alone

Madeleine Adams: their daughter, 24 years old, living in Portland, OR where she is working as a tutor for young children

ACT ONE

Wed, Jul 11, 2017

iMessage between John, Marianne, and Madeleine

Adams, John/ 4:21 pm

I found a jawbone in the woods today

Adams, Madeleine/ 4:23

What kind?

Marianne/4:25

What kind of animal?

John/ 4:28

I think it may be caveman

Madeleine/ 4:29

Wow! A lot of excitement!

John/4:31

No, probably cow—too small for deer

Marianne/4:36

How did your eye dr appt go?

John/ 4:39

Looks like I hAVE to live with eye globs

Madeleine/ 4:51

What are you talking about??

John/ 4:52

DK

Madeleine/4:53

DK???!

John/ 4:56

Sorry—for your mother. Tell you when you get home

ACT TWO

Thursday, July 12, 2017

iMessage between Marianne and John

Marianne/ 4:35 pm

Did you remember to feed the cat?

Adams, John/ 4:36

I fed him

4:38

To the bear that went through the yard

4:39

haha

4:41

No, he puked on the rug

4:43

I mean yes

Marianne/4:45 pm

Too many treats?

John/4:47 pm

maybe or mouseguts

V. To explain why writing may be dangerous, Socrates tells Phaedrus what Thamus said:

“’This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls’, Thamus said to Theuth, ‘because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. You have discovered an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; …they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

VI. A strong indictment: Writing things down makes you more forgetful—more apt to make it look like you know things when you don’t. And you become lazy, since you can write things down rather than carrying them around in your head.

VII. But this pronouncement raises as many questions as it answers: Is forgetfulness the vice we risk? Or is reminiscence, rather than memory, the problem? Is the separation of artifact from writer really a problem? If we memorize things (birthdays, anniversaries, poems) do we become better at remembering?

Should we become better at remembering? Maybe.

It depends, I suppose, on what we’re trying to remember, and why.

But, oddly enough, writing also makes forgetting hard.

There are your words, your sentences, from yesterday, or last month, or from thirty years ago. To what extent are they yours, now? Maybe they aren’t, but they seem to stick to you whether you want them to or not.

Many of us are, it seems, creatures of our written words.

VIII. My sister, brother, and I divvied up our mother’s recipes when she died. She’d stopped using recipes, for the most part, years before she died, since she was only cooking for herself. And many of those “recipes” she knew by heart how to make anyway. So she didn’t need all the index cards we’d written on, or the box of recipe cards that collected dust in a cupboard. All those hours of writing we did, copying recipes the way that Medieval monks copied pages of scripture.

But we appreciated the neat handwriting that we had, ourselves, produced. We could read the cards and make the recipes ourselves.

Useful artefacts to take home with us.

But we valued more highly the ones she’d written.

I still have them, in a plastic golden yellow box covered with stickers of homey kitchen scenes. They are pretty much illegible.

IX. When I was cleaning out my mother’s dresser after she died I found that she’d saved some of the letters I’d sent her from London:

February 1985: “We went to the Sir John Soane Museum today. It’s in a house.”

March 1985: “We’re moving to a cheaper apartment in West Kensington. I like Chelsea, but Lori wants to live “with the real people” in W. Ken. I told her I’d spent enough time with “real people” growing up in Lakeland/Solvay, but she has a romantic view of blue-collar life. She didn’t have to live it.”

April 1985: “I’ll be here until June 15. PLEASE PLEASE COME VISIT! I’ll meet you at the airport. You can stay in my bed. There are some cheap flights. You would love it here!”

X. She didn’t come to visit, and didn’t write back until June. I got the letter as I was packing up my apartment and getting ready to return to the US.

She didn’t have much to tell. It was about three sentences long, written on a piece of 5x7 lined notepaper, double-spaced. I think she felt guilty, not writing to me all those months.

XI. I was so excited to receive her letter, and yet I didn’t keep it—it wasn’t what she’d written that was important to me. It was the letter itself, sitting in my mailbox in London one day, with my name and address, written in her hand. That was what mattered—not what she wrote. I can still see her big loopy handwriting, written in light blue ink by a Bic ballpoint pen, on that piece of paper. Thirty-five years later.

But the recipes, I have those. Even though they’re illegible.

I don’t use those recipes.

But they are more than just written words.

Marianne Janack

Marianne Janack is the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. She teaches courses about the self, feminist theory, science, and knowledge. She is the founding editor of Book XI: a Journal of Literary Philosophy. Her academic work has been published by Stanford University Press, Penn State University Press, and several other academic journals. Her journalistic work has been published by Aeon and The Conversation. Her creative work has been published by Grub Street Literary Journal, Stone Canoe, and zone 3. She writes a newsletter on Substack: "Marianne Janack's Reading Recommendations and Some Philosophy."