Myth dusting

I had what I consider an interesting insight the other day on the way that memory edits itself.

In 2007 during my last long trip, I bought a small silver pendant representing the famous Phaestos Disc.  Like those silver or gold hearts that can be broken in half to share with someone, this could be broken in half.   So much is fact.

Over time I built a romantic little anecdote around this pendant.  It started out simply factual, but each time I repeated the story I "improved" upon it.  Not unusual - I'm a storyteller and it's in my nature to attempt to make the most of a good yarn, filing off the rough edges in order to make it rounder, neater and hopefully more interesting.  Usually I keep track of fact and fiction and don't confuse them, but in the case of the pendant, I actually believed the new version.

Thus the anecdote: After ten years as a corporate clone I set out on the 2007 trip intending to change the person I was.  There was a me I remembered.  Somewhere along the way I had lost that me.  Now I wanted him back.  The first few months of the trip passed uneventfuly, but inside me the change was working through.  The breakthrough finally came one intense night in Corfu.  I rejoined the human race that night.  A few weeks later, in Crete, I had a brief, intense relationship with a woman.  I bought the pendant to remind me of her, planning to give one half of it to her should I meet her again, or else to some other fellow traveller who seemed deserving of it.

I did not question this story.  I "knew" it so well that there seemed no reason to go back and check my records.  Then a couple of nights back I was browsing through my photos from 2007 and I came across a picture of the pendant - taken in Methoni, over a week before I reached Crete.  There was an obvious contradiction here.  If I'd had the pendant in Methoni then I could not possibly have bought it in the wake of events in Crete!

I checked my record of expenditures on the 2007-2008 trip and the truth began to emerge.  In fact I bought the pendant in Corfu on the 11th of June, just three days after the breakthrough.  I already had it in Crete.  Indeed, now that I was looking for it, I could see it around my neck in photos taken on Crete.  Therefore the core of the fable was not only false to fact but false to itself, as if I'd really bought the thing with my friend in mind I could have given it to her then and there!

Faced with these facts I dug back and gradually unwound the anecdote.  I had indeed bought the pendant intending to give it to a travel companion somewhere, sometime, should the case ever arise, but I bought it in memory of the breakthrough three days earlier, not of the relationship on Crete.  I did not give it to my friend on Crete simply because we were not travelling together - she did not fit the profile.

The truth is not as poetical or romantic as the anecdote.  It has loose ends and too many characters.  So I improved the yarn.  And I liked the improved yarn so much that, over time, I forgot that it was just a yarn.

Writing about real events can be as much an act of creativity as writing a novel.  Memory is not a video recording: perhaps each time we recall a memory, we change the memory minutely.  Writing from memory alone, then you run a real risk of setting down an edited, artificial version of events. If that fits your immediate purpose, fine.  Otherwise, there is no substitute for keeping an honest, clear diary of your trip.