The Mysterious Case of the Forgotten Language

Over at Peter Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders recently, the discussion turned to the curious fact that one of the members of the Swedish group ABBA, once fluent in English, has completely forgotten it. As several of us were trying to figure out how this could possibly be, it occurred to me that it would make a good post on this lapsed but not forgotten blog.

According to this informal but anecdotally interesting blog post, the facility with which children learn languages is exactly the reason why they forget them more easily when distanced from them too. In contrast,

Adult learners normally learn languages through grammar which gives them a skeleton onto which they hang the meat of vocabulary. Grammar based learning never delivers as good as result as immersion based learning but it does have the advantage of giving you hard wired rules that you don’t forget.

And another tangentially related article tells us that when people are trying to learn a new language, forgetting the correlate word in their own tongue may actually be an adaptive strategy. College students who had one year of Spanish under their belts were asked to name objects in Spanish, and the more they did so, the harder it was for them to come up with the word in English. Apparently, it gets easier to keep both in mind as you become more fluent in the second language.

Finally, I happened upon this rather poignant NPR piece about a Thai-American woman who was relearning Thai as an adult after her parents had made the decision that they would all speak only English in their new home in the Midwest--an adaptive strategy in its own right, but one that may have brought as many losses as it did gains.

The Life Beyond

We all die, though virtually, it ain't necessarily so. Sara Paretsky's new website led me to this recent Times Magazine article , which has much to say about the ways the dead live on in their online presence, and how memory may be enhanced and shared by such possibilities.

This may seem a bit macabre, but I have already encountered my first blog ended by reason of death. This was the excellent blog of poet Reginald Shepherd, who died too young, of cancer. He's left us--his blog still remains. The survival of the blog is a good thing, I think. There is much to mine there, for those who are interested in his thought, and it remains a place where his partner can post announcements about various things related to the man and the poetry. Still, it does remain slightly unsettling to go to the bottom of my blog roll and click on that blog. I am tempted to erase it sometimes, as it's hardly dynamic.

For now, though, I think I'll leave it be.

On Forgetting Where You Read It

It's slightly ironic that I thought my next post here would be about a quote from Antonio Machado regarding dreams and memory. As those of you who have your own blogs may recognize, an aspect of the blogging world is that it turns many pieces of your own life into potential material. So I was quite excited when, going through a stack of used books I was considering purchasing, I came across this opening quote that seemed so apt.

Unfortunately, I can't find it again.

I've looked at all the books I thought it was in, but no dice. I've done a little internet research, but it turns out Machado has spoken, or perhaps more accurately, written poetry about dreams and memory many times. In any case, the quote did not come back to me.

Fortunately, this has sent me on a somewhat different tack about memory. I couldn't tell you how many times I have read something brilliant, or that resonated with me, or at the very least was worth recalling and pondering, and then been too lazy to drop what I was doing and write it down. Neither could I recount the number of times I have subsequently searched the text I know it was in, only to come up empty handed. "It had to have been about here." "I remember it came right after this." "I am absolutely sure it was on the left hand side of the page, towards the middle." If I turn out to be fifty percent right about these 'certainties', I'd be surprised.

More often than not, I never find the line that caught my interest again.

Now I'm sure more tenacious people, or those rare, commendable people with photographic memories, are sneering slightly at this point. And really, I don't blame them. I must say that if by now I haven't learned that I should at least make note of the page number, or in this case, the title--by which I mean actually write it down--well, more fool me.

But here's the interesting part. Sometimes, I do find the quote. And usually, it is not quite how I remembered. It does not quite express the point I thought it did. It says something almost the same, but not quite. It turns out that I have put my own spin on it. Used it to my own ends. It's not usually in contradiction to what the writer has to say, but my own brain has 'tweaked' it slightly. In some way, my mind has taken the ball and run with it. Hopefully towards our side's goalpost, but not always.

I like to think that this doesn't mean that I am just a careless reader, though obviously, sometimes I am. The more charitable view is that we all read things and sometimes identify closely with them, leading to our own insights, which we then in turn read back into the text, altering it ever so slightly as we go.

At least, I really hope it's not just me.

"The true kiss vanishes the moment their lips separate."

In other words,"If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you're likely to change it."

Or so I learned from Radio Lab, a show produced by WNYC, which my friend Brian O'Rourke was kind enough to track down for me. Admittedly, this was awhile ago, but although the theme of this blog might suggest otherwise, I did not actually forget about this. I have only recently gotten a DSL hookup, which makes listening to an hour long radio show on my laptop possible, rather than merely theoretical.

Just listened to the first segment, which was more than enough to absorb for one night.

In any case, here's the link.

On forgetting and remembering one's classmates

I just took a little trip down memory lane over the weekend when one of my high school friends, who I truly hadn't seen in a couple of decades, came to town and had lunch with me one day. Any event like this is an exercise in reminiscence--there's a bit of taxing of the grey matter that's both challenging and enjoyable. I wouldn't automatically have mentioned this on this blog, but I had an odd experience in relation to this that seemed apropos. My friend mentioned a name from our class, someone whom she'd gotten to know a bit better in recent years, and though I knew the name, could even remember the brother of the girl, I couldn't remember the person she meant at all. My friend left to return home and I was mulling over all that we'd talked about, when suddenly the image of the girl snapped into place. This is someone I haven't thought of since I graduated high school, I think, but suddenly she was vivid to me, unforgotten after all. And I have to say that this recollection of a person I had completely forgotten about filled me with a sense of elation and well being. It wasn't anything about the person herself so much as the mental act of remembering that was the elixir. It was like a replenishing or a repopulating of my own inner substance. It was unusual, though I suspect others have similar moments to recount. Feel free to do so here...

That was fun--now what?

Awhile back I posted my fear that this blog would become a victim of my own forgetfulness, and wondered about all the forgotten blogs out there. Although its early demise has turned out to be a false alarm, Slate magazine currently has an article about one tweet Twitters and mentions in passing the link to a blog dedicated to one post blogs.

Now the reason for these abandoned twitters and blogs is probably boredom and lack of self-discipline more than forgetfulness, but I'm sure that a lapse of memory does play into most of them after awhile...

Check out that One Post Wonder blog by the way. It looks good.

Speak, Memory--but don't say too much

I think I mentioned awhile ago that I have come up with several ideas for post here that don't involve too much work on my part. Here's another.

When I read Nabokov's Speak, Memory in the not so distant past, I came across this article from Salon Magazine, which supplements his story a little.

All families have secrets, and I suppose all writers suppress certain aspects about their family that are hard for them to admit, for whatever reasons. However, when you invoke memory deliberately, you are setting a higher bar for yourself, and editing out your younger brother in the kind of ways Nabokov apparently did involves some effort.

I admire Nabokov as a writer, though my reading of the novels is patchy at best. I did not care for Speak, Memory, though. I am wonder if this particular lapse of memory may hold some of the reasons why.