Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember a little more about tying ties. I remember that the first time my father tied a tie around my neck, there was something magical about seeing that knot, which my father and his father had in their ties, suddenly materialize out of the simple over-and-under movements of the long and slightly triangular strip of material. Marc B also showed me a simple way of tying a tie and I could suddenly, magically, make that knot materialize by myself! And I still can.

posted by william 4:23 PM
. . . 5 comments

Comments:

I remember having to learn it when my father and anyone else who knew was not around for some reason, so I just stood in front of a mirror and tried for a couple of hours when, magically, it worked. That amazed me... that it was simple enough that you could arrive at it by trial-and-error.

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# posted by  Anonymous : 6:50 PM

 

Manual memory is a wondrous thing, isn't it? I recently asked my mother if she could teach me to make a particular kind of bread from her region which involves a rather complicated shape, and she said she didn't know if she could on account of the fact it had been sixty or so years since the last time she had done it. Then as soon as I put a strip of flat dough in front of her her hands got to work and she found she had no trouble at all. She couldn't visualise the procedure, or describe it in great detail, but it was still all there.

# posted by  Giovanni Tiso : 12:03 AM

 

I guess you can't really reply to comments through Blogger, the way you can on Livejournal. Well, this is a reply to Giovanni -- this is called (in English) "gist memory," a wonderful concept.

# posted by  william : 9:54 AM

 

I might have phrased it badly - what I meant is that my mother wasn't surprised to have retained the gist memory of how to make the bread, but rather that she still retained the exact procedural memory as well, and that it didn't become apparent until her hands started moving. Of course this happens all the time (I couldn't draw a computer keyboard, but my fingers know exactly where the keys are), it was just a particularly striking example for us since as I say she hadn't done it for so long - since before the war to be exact.

# posted by  Giovanni Tiso : 5:16 PM

 

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