My mother gave my family a very thoughtful and loving Christmas gift this year. She took our old home movies on Betamax tapes and had them transferred to DVD. It ain’t cheap. She and my dad started recording these movies on Christmas Eve 1986 (the night they were given the camera), only five weeks into my life. Most of these old movies hadn’t been watched by anyone in probably over 10 years, when we finally got rid of our Beta player.
We spent some time as a family watching these DVDs over the past few days. They were amusing but sort of baffling. My brother is barely talking, and I’m incapable of holding up my own head. At one point while watching this, my dad sort of shook his head in wonder and said to my brother and me, “It must be amazing to see this kind of footage and know that it’s you.”
The old man was born in 1946, so of course he’s never had that experience. The only records of his infancy are some fairly grainy black and white prints. I understood what he was getting at, but in truth I was ambivalent about the amazingness of seeing the infant Dan being bathed, being fed, etc. It was amazing to see my parents 25 years younger and to see what they had to do to raise their children, but I never had any strong feeling that I was looking at me.
The thing about infants is that they’re essentially the same. One may be fussier than another and one may be smilier, but they haven’t developed clearly identifiable personalities. They have no mannerisms, their faces are less distinct than adults’, they communicate only the most basic needs through the most basic means. Imagine I had never seen a baby photo or baby video of myself. If you showed me at age 25 a video of me at age five weeks, would I be able—independently—to identify the baby as myself? Of course not.
I feel no connection at all to that helpless little larva with squinty eyes. Why would I? Some hyper-geniuses claim to remember parts of infancy, but I sure don’t. I doubt that I would be able to identify myself at age one, either—presuming, again, I had no prior knowledge of my childhood appearance nor any prompting from family. And I might not be able to do it even at age two—or later. When you think about it, it’s really hard to say. If I sat down and watched home movies of myself from birth to age five—and we’ll just imagine they’re some kind of clinical home movies in which my family members don’t appear and my name isn’t said—I would probably come across something that I remembered independent of the movie. At that point I would be able to connect the image with the past experience and realize who I was looking at.
Until that point, though, the kid in the pictures would be a stranger. How could it be otherwise? Do you remember what your hair looked like when you were three or what your voice sounded like when you were four? You might tell yourself you do, but that’s only because you’ve been regularly looking at photos and watching videos of yourself for years.
I have few distinct memories from the first five years of my life. I think this is probably true for most people. I have many strong impressions—remnants of emotions—from that time, but only a handful of memories of specific incidents. That makes it pretty tough to match up a photo or a video of early childhood with a genuine memory. Very rarely am I able to look at an old photo and say, “Yes, I remember this exact moment.” I can say things like, “Oh, this is from our trip to the Oregon Coast when I was six,” but again, I can only say this because I’ve been looking at those photos forever.
People born in the second half of the twentieth century and later remember their lives in a way profoundly different from that of any human beings previously. We are inundated with images of ourselves. Every time I visit my folks, I walk through the hall where we have the portrait of me at three months, the family portrait where I’m one, the snapshot of me at age six holding my pet rat, and many others. I’ve seen all of these literally thousands of times, and I’d guess my experience is typical. The result of seeing these pictures over and over is that we have mental images of our past with no actual memories underneath to them. I have a picture of my family’s life in 1988. But do I remember it? No.
The conventional wisdom is that photos evoke memories. I don’t think that’s true. I think people use photos to build memories. The photo of me standing next to Yaquina Head Lighthouse doesn’t evoke a memory. It is the memory. I tell myself I remember it, because I’m holding incontrovertible proof that it took place. Clearly the photo knows more than I do.
I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing that we’ve fabricated memories this way. But it does probably mean we don’t know ourselves quite as well as we think we do.
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