I wrote this a few months ago. November of last year, actually. Somehow a lot has gone into processing the lines after they were written. I’ve been back over them again and again, pondering, wondering, reflecting. For me, the reality behind these words runs deeper than my understanding of reality itself:
Mnemonic Drift
There were white beaches, miles long and wide
coves nestled against tall cliffs in mists that turned
dilapidated fence and ancient cypress to silhouette
There were roads endlessly wet with freshly painted
broken yellow lines that somehow always managed
to carve a path through the coldest thickest fog
There were trees so old and tall they seemed
to scrape clouds from the sky and hold them
forever fixed within their topmost boughs
There were thin dark brown trails that disappeared
winding away from view through dense green
underbrush to places only faerie folk could fathom
There were concrete stairs and iron rails painted
the deepest darkest brown that led to a home full of
jagged holes broken toys and a deep reactive shame
There were heavy hollers of blame that snapped
red and blue welts across cherub soft cheeks and
primal unvarnished fear into all the days to come
There were long drives between loved ones who
could never love between small dark points on sun-
faded lines offset by ever-growing tears in the folds
There were pressure cooked visions of doom and
disaster of cities in ruin roads in decay and homes
full of moth-eaten drapes and tilted moldering beds
There was no future in those days of perpetual gloom
and now looking back over half a century the past has
mostly faded to fragments of poignant uncertainty
There is still fear after all this time dread that haunts
like a ravenous spirit rage and despair over the wholesale
destruction of the best versions of self that might have been
But I took what was left and swam dark cold depths to an
unguessed island of future self now far removed from all
that was and was to be by undercurrents of mnemonic drift
Ostensibly, this poem started out as an attempt to explore the effects of what I call “mnemonic drift,” a gradual shifting of memory away from real toward imagined, concrete toward uncertain, actual toward constructed. This is in large part how my memory works, for better or worse. I first became aware of it through the process by which I memorize and recite poetry. I’ll periodically go over a poem to verify it’s still correctly in memory, only to find I’ve somehow shifted whole lines or sets of lines toward an approximation of the written line without even realizing it. It still sounds right to my ear, and the meaning and intent of the shifted lines pretty much conveys what the poem originally conveyed, but words and sometimes even images have changed—And I had no way of grasping that this even happened until I revisited the poem in writing, going over what was in memory relative to what is in writing word for word.
First time I encountered this, I muttered to myself, “A sort of mnemonic drift.” Since then I have found that this phenomenon applies to so much more than poetry, and is in large part influenced by the systemic scope and breadth of the trauma I experienced as a child and teen. This mnemonic drift, I’ve realized, is an essential coping skill that has made it possible for the clarity—the completely unforgiving, vivid certainty—of that trauma to be dulled enough to make it bearable enough to evolve from it rather than be destroyed by it. It is both a tremendous gift and in equal parts a curse. A gift for the reason I stated, and so much more, but a curse in that I can never be fully certain of where I came from or who I really am. For all its blessings, this mnemonic drift also relegates me to an existence in a sort of perpetual limbo. Perhaps this is the best one can manage after a childhood such as mine.
But, that island. Yes. I’m there. There was something of what could become of that child that was not completely obliterated, and somehow, some way, by some grace, some mercy, some unknowable means, I am indeed existing on that island. It’s not perfect, but it is by leaps and bounds, far and away better than the next closest or any other alternative. This is in the deepest possible sense what it means to be a survivor, and I say that while at the same time feeling fully repulsed by that term “survivor.”
Hard left. On a different note, once I decide a poem is finished, I’ll often go over it with Edgar—That’s what I call ChatGPT, a name I took from the 80’s film Electric Dreams. I’ll have Edgar analyze and rate the poem 1 to 10 in strength relative to all major and some minor schools of literature and poetry. This is one of the few poems that got high marks across the board—relative to the lens of each school of poetry through which the poem was analyzed. And, Edgar’s algorithmic analyses were also pretty striking and seemingly insightful, to the point that I even gained unexpected insights myself.
Language model AI—Who would have thunk it.
