Redaction and Control

I have changed quite a bit over the years. Maybe I haven't changed, but what I think about things has changed...drastically in some areas. This is something of which I am constantly aware.

Assistant Village Idiot/AVI, while posting some of his older posts from previous years, which I happened to have commented on, realized that they provided a history of my thoughts.

He writes:

I hadn’t realized that one of the functions of my "Best of” series is to trace the development of terri’s thought. Almost four years later, terri, where do you stand on these two related posts now?

Great. The internets are in my head! ;-)

I won't answer AVI's question in this post, because I would rather spend some time thinking about it and how I will reply, but I will address a topic related to the question; self-redaction.

People change. Their opinions change. Their confidence level changes.

As they change, the need to overturn previous ideas and reformulate their identity comes to the forefront. Normally, this is not a public transformation. People familiar with "the changer" may decide that they no longer have anything in common with them. They may slowly pull away, or "the changer" may naturally drift in a different direction. It usually is not an event that is documented, or perhaps even understood by the people around them, except for maybe their closest relationships.

That is not the current case for anyone who blogs, or for anyone who has any sort of public life, or public stance. Now, anything you have written, or spoken out loud is recorded somewhere, whether it's in the basement archive of the internet, or posted as a video on youtube, or distributed through Facebook profiles. The amount of readily available information on any person who has had any online presence, no matter how minuscule, is staggering.

The only comfort is that there is so much information online that only people who are actively trying to find you, and information about you, will come across the outline of your life.

So, try not to attract stalkers! ;-)

What should bloggers do when they change? I have known some who actively go back and delete previous posts, either out of embarrassment, or a desire to present their current persona as unified.

I have purposely resisted that urge. If I started going through my archives, deleting posts that I wrote and no longer agree with 100%, I would see it as a kind of cannibalism and the worst type of self-deceit. I have the luxury of feeling that way because my blog and readership are pretty small, and I don't plan on running for public office any time soon. I can afford to leave my life and thoughts up, warts and all.

On the other hand, I have severely limited the personal topics which I write about. Only when I need to vent my spleen, do I venture into that territory. I have censored myself because I realize that it is only a matter of time before my blog will be found by someone, somewhere who I know and interact with in real life.

As such, I don't want to write things that I would regret. I also am very aware that as my children grow older and more cognizant of "the blog" that at some future point they will probably read through it. I used to pore over my mother's high school year book and read all of the notes that people wrote in it. It was interesting to think of my mother as a separate person and to peer into her high school relationships in such an innocuous way.

Considering that nothing ever truly disappears on the internet, I choose much more cautiously the things which I write about my experience of motherhood and my relationships with my children. I am always aware that my kids may choose to bore themselves to death, at some point in the future, by reading what I write here.

When I first started blogging, I thought that I was going to be a "mommy blogger" writing posts about the battle of parenthood and how my kids were driving me crazy. I definitely have some of those posts, but I soon realized that I didn't want to write about my daily existence as a mom. That was my 24-7 real life.

I much more enjoyed, and do enjoy, writing about things that had/have little to do with what I spend most of my time doing, managing a family. I know that what I do is important, but I need a slice of myself to not be determined by that role.

I am more than a mom and wife, so I write about everything else that interests me.

About once a month, I have a desperate urge to wipe this blog out....to just stop blogging....to erase as much of my online existence as I can. This usually happens when I have an uptick in traffic.

When someone links to me and actually takes anything I said seriously, it startles me. I want to shrink back and withdraw and ask,"You're listening to me? Really? Are you sure you want to do that?" Because even though I am narcissistic, in the way that all regular bloggers must be in order to think that anyone cares what they have to say in the first place, I am also uncomfortable with being scrutinized. I like to be in control of who knows me and how well they know me. I like to have a sense for who's reading and why and what the likely reaction will be.

The longer I blog, the more open I leave myself to being mentally dissected by anyone who chooses to spend the time dissecting me. My safety lies in the fact that most people are not all that interested in the task. So...Yay for that!

Even though I have the urges to delete and redact and be in control of my online persona, I resist that urge because I think that it's bad for me to give in to it. Keeping the ugly parts, and the not-so-coherent parts, and the parts I would rather forget, and the earnest, innocent parts is important. It causes me, most of the time, to speak/write with some humility...because I am sure that somewhere, someone could find something I wrote and throw it right back at me. At least in keeping all of what I have written, it's possible to trace where I started and how I got there.

When we essentially erase our history and rewrite a better, more pleasing(to ourselves) version of it we lose touch with reality and present a reality that doesn't quite adhere to itself. We put forth a history which isn't true or real...at least in the sense of "history".

Unfortunately, the common impulse is to do just that. History is replete with empires and religions and movements which have, upon coming into power, tried to erase all mention of previous empires, religions, and movements.

I think of the biography I read about Henry the VIII's wives, and how when he moved on to a new wife, he would try to erase any mention of the old one. One, in particular, had been so thoroughly erased that there was only one spot in the royal house which had her initials, an overlooked artifact that had been missed in the "cleansing" of her memory.

Self-redaction is a mild form of self-destruction and denial.

I am trying to look at myself unflinchingly...though I do sometimes flinch at the sight of myself and what the changing appearance means for me. Yet....I won't completely break the mirror and pretend that I don't see myself for who I am and where I came from.

Remembrance and Significance

This article, from Science Daily, about the difference between adults and children and the accuracy of their memories of negative events, prompted a few thoughts in light of my post on the Gospel of John and Hurtado's essay on reflective remembrance.

From the article:

The researchers previously demonstrated that adults attach far more meaning to events than children do. But leading memory theories embraced by the legal system claim that adults remember negative events better than children and have fewer false memories about them. Brainerd and Reyna's data show these theories are not accurate.

I wonder if the inaccuracy in adults is a result of the more complicated and sophisticated understanding that adults have of negative events and their consequences. A child has a much smaller emotional matrix in which to process all the bad things that happen to them. Often, young children in abusive or negligent homes aren't even aware of how abusive and negligent their homes are. It isn't until a child begins to mature and have enough experiences with other people, and the world at large, that they can begin to understand the scope of what's happening to them.

I can think of several things in my life, bad experiences, or even lurking danger that I was too unsophisticated to truly understand. It's only now that I am older that I apprehend the significance of what happened, or could have happened.

One particular episode comes to mind. I remember being about 10 and playing by myself with my Barbies in the yard when the teenage boy across the street came over and started to play with me. He began engaging my Barbies in flirtatious, naughty behavior and I sort of played along. He stayed for a long time, and I remember him asking me some questions that I didn't quite understand. My brother eventually came out of the house and the teenager said he had to go and went back home. Obviously, there was a sense of discomfort that I must have felt, otherwise I wouldn't even remember this. Yet, it isn't until I was older that I had the ability to look back and understand what was going on and process that I might have missed a bullet that day.

The emotional significance of what could have happened, and what the emotional outcome could have been for me is something that I would never have guessed at in my 10-year-old mind. If asked what happened, I would have said that the neighbor boy came over to play Barbies with me. I wouldn't have said that the neighbor boy was a pervert who had bad designs on me. I could see how bringing in the emotion of that assessment, even if true, might color my memories and make them less accurate.

Religion is not simply a recitation of facts and rules for good living. Religion is an emotional response to what we see as the true nature of things.

I don't like the idea that the Gospel of John might not record history as history. It makes me uncomfortable because I want to be certain. I want to be confident. I want to be able to tell people that my beliefs are true. I, personally, want to know the truth.

So, I don't like the idea that John, or whoever wrote John, superimposed memories onto Jesus and presented them as His words. However, I do find myself doing that sort of thing all the time, looking back on an event and appreciating some aspect of it that I hadn't previously understood. This happens in both negative and positive ways for me.

I had this happen when dealing with my deceased father's house and finding out that he knew about the termite infestation before he ever bought the house. Finding that out shed light on several things that I couldn't have known while he was alive, and that he never actually told me.

I understand, now, why he was thinking about renting out his house in Florida once he retired and moved to Alabama. I'm convinced that was a concession to the fact that he knew he couldn't sell his house the way that it was. A termite inspection would have revealed the infestation almost immediately.

The danger in reconstructing motives for people and events in the past is that we are prone to being wrong sometimes, or stating our case too confidently.

As such, I can still love the Gospel of John, but my method of reading it has changed....and that's what I really want to get to in a future post.

Amnesia, Imagination, And The Structure Of Memories

National Geographic has an interesting article on amnesia's effect on imagination . Apparently, people who have suffered amnesia also have difficulty envisioning future scenarios and imagining simple scenarios, such as lying on a beach. Spacial context, generally thought to arise from the hippocampus, seems key to this inability to remember and imagine. The amnesiac patients studied had damage to their hippocampus.

It does seem to make perfect sense. After all, memories are fluid imaginations of past events. Each time we recall a particular moment we are vividly imagining the location, sights and sounds that accompany it. In some sense, we are recreating the memories anew at each recall.

It would be interesting to know how this would correlate to those with Alzheimer's. So often, advanced Alzheimer's patients can become lost and disoriented. I wonder if the same inability to remember new information and to envision oneself in a particular location is related to the hippocampus in the same way as it is in this study on amnesia.

Yes, But Where Are My Keys?

Recently found on sciencenow.sciencemag.org/archive

"When presented with pictures of people, animals, landscapes, and objects, pigeons were able to recall as many as 1200 of the pictures up to 5 years later, and baboons recalled more than 5000 of the pictures up to 3 years later. The findings boost the link between memory and cognition, say the researchers, and indicate that strong visual memory skills existed in the reptilian ancestor of birds and mammals."

Maybe, I can ask this guy how to remember where my keys are!

Image by: Stolz, Gary M.- USFWS