What was the last thing you forgot?
I thought I’d forgotten about Chumbawamba
Their song about not remembering whether they had amnesia
And discovered the reasons we forget
There are three
Sometimes the memory is simply lost
I fail to record it
I struggle to retrieve it
I lose it through the passage of time
And I may as well never have learned it
Sometimes the memory was never right
A subtle hint overwrites it
A trick of the mind confuses where I got it
A belief or assumption filters and interprets it
And surely I learn to trust my memory less
And then, of course, I could repress it
Squash it into the back of my mind
Remembering Freud’s unproven theories
Hoping that what’s left behind
Leaves me feeling more positive
I once witnessed a traffic accident and gave a statement to a police officer, who explained that what I told him was simply wrong, but that it was ok because people have false memories all the time.
This poem is based on Daniel Schacter’s Seven Sins of Memory, and I manage to get a little jab in at Freud, whose work is so influential and yet so full of speculation.