A Memory Palace

I have been kicking this idea around for some time---at least since reading "The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie.

I am haunted by everything I've forgotten.  About 10 years ago, I was struggling with some chronic headaches---like a headache that lasted a month long---punctuated with an occasional migraine. The kind of migraine where you have to lie in a darkened room protected from every stimuli because any interruption of the tenuous hold you have on sanity will push you over the vomiting, writhing edge. I shudder just thinking about it. 

The myriad of doctors dedicated to confusing me and not working together while treating my lupus symptoms decided I needed a battery of tests.  One of those was a memory test, and the results were equally alarming in their individual potential and collective vagueness.  The neurologist said "Either you are in the early stages of Alzheimer's, or lupus is affecting your brain." I think it's fairly safe to say it is the latter rather than the former.  I voiced my concern about Alzheimer's to my primary doc, and he put me at ease (about Alzheimer's, anyway) by saying "Carolyn, everybody loses their keys; it's when you can't remember what keys are for that we start to really worry".  Whew. But then that means lupus is picking away at my brain in some way....

I forget a lot of things. Little things. Big events.  Some are just very vague, but some are gone completely.  Brain fog is worse on some days. Some of my students love this; some are exasperated by it; some probably don't notice.  I used to tell myself I just need to live in the present, but then one day a colleague invited me to sit in on a discussion of a landscape painting I'd done (now hanging in the 3rd floor hallway of the Overcash Building).  I hadn't looked at the painting since completing it several years before.  Immediately, I was transported back to the moment I painted it.  I remember what I was thinking as I painted each passage.  I remember why I chose one color over another. I remember what the paint smelled like.  I remember the way the canvas responded to each stroke of my brush. 

Ultimately, I realized that I can remember almost all my works in this way.  I am sure there are a number of reasons for this---the fact that I was clearly present in physical and emotional way has to factor---but what really concerns me is figuring out what to do about it.

My thinking is that building my own version of a memory palace might be key to feeling I have some management of this condition I find myself held hostage. I don't know exactly how it will come together it, but at this point, I see a series of work that forms a visual record of memories and events. A memory palace exists in the mind, but I can't rely on mine.  I need the physical embodiment of a memory----both for memory's sake, and just maybe, for sanity's sake.