on Recognition

I was watching a short film the other day and suddenly got a terrible case of Deja Vu.  I could have sworn I'd seen this particular scene.  A few minutes later the feeling subsided.  Deja Vu is not a prediction, or a memory from a past life.  It's a random misfiring in the memory center of your brain, giving you the sudden feeling of recognition without actual memory connections.  If you think you're suddenly having a psychic moment, try your hardest to predict what is going to happen next.  Once the next thing happens your brain will still trigger the recognition, but you won't be able to predict it.  A string of these recognitions will eventually alert the warning centers of the brain, telling you something ominous or wonderful is about to occur.  This is a defense mechanism scientists are still trying to work out.

Pattern recognition is an ability we are born with.  Babies see the shapes of faces, regardless of orientation (whether the face is upside down, sideways or right side up).  Eventually, before they can really focus, they can recognize their parents' or caregivers' faces from strangers.  Our brains can pick shapes, color, darkness & lightness out of nearly any image and turn it into a face, a body, or anything we can recognize.

Sometimes, if I wake up in the middle of the night and look at one of the pictures on the wall, or the lamp at the bedside, the shape may be common, but my brain can't recognize it.  It may take up to a minute or two for me to finally realize it's just a lamp and not a person standing there.  Sometimes I actually get angry because my brain searches for a reason that the painting on the wall is unrecognizable and comes up with an excuse: obviously that picture has been switched out by my partner.  If I'm still mostly asleep my brain may concoct an entire story about why the picture has been replaced. As I wake up and the picture's details emerge more clearly it will trigger the recognition and I will now remember where it came from and that it is the very same picture hanging on the wall for years.  I imagine this is how Alzheimer's disease feels as those memories disappear and all the familiar things and people no longer trigger recognition.

on Memory

Robert's oldest brother Richard was already serving in the military overseas when Robert was born.  The age disparity was so great Robert was closer with his niece and nephews than with his own brother.  Kazuko married Richard with the hopes of a new life in America, a chance to live the indelible American dream.  She ended up living in Hoisington, Kansas, a tiny town in the very middle of the United States surrounded by a flat, harsh country.  Kansas is hot and humid in the summer time, cold and snowy in the winter.

Now in her Seventies, Kazuko lives at a home for the elderly, her memory fading daily.  She is suffering from Alzheimer's, arguably one of the cruelest diseases.  Many times she things her daughter Kathy is actually her sister, coming to visit or pick her up for some event.

This past weekend Kathy earned her master's degree and Kazuko attended.  I'm not certain she understood what was really occurring, but she seemed proud of Kathy.  Kazuko herself had earned two bachelor's degrees in a Japanese college, a remarkable feat for a woman in those days. The next day Robert's other niece graduated High School and again Kazuko was in attendance, and again I'm not sure she understood where she was or why she was there, but all the time she smiled.

Outside the event Kazuko paid more attention to the sky than to the photo opportunities occurring around her.  She pointed upward at some balloons which someone had released, floating up against a sun-setting panorama and said, "It's so beautiful!"

Although she spoke to me a couple of times, smiling all the while, she seemed a bit disturbed when I followed the group.  She stayed very close to Kathy.  I was a stranger and she didn't know what my intentions were.  At one point she looked around at all the caps and gowns and told me that she 'had always wanted to please her father.  Her father was an ambassador and traveled all the time, rarely home.  By going to college and getting a good education she thought it would make him proud.  However, the education would also give her the ability to survive without a father, if need be.'  He disowned her when she married Richard, a deep cut that wounded her for the rest of her life.

The past is clearer than the present.  The moments of clarity come and go.  Are we still people when we no longer have memories, or are we really the sum of our memories and nothing else?  Kazuko still feels the pain of a missing father, a lost husband and son, and she can still find beauty in the simplest of vistas.