History is a thin thread of yarn stretched over a vast ocean of the forgotten.

As soon as I saw it I loved it. Lo que tú quieras oír – “What You Want to Hear” – is a short (and free-to-download) film by Spanish director Guillermo Zapata. It follows the story of Sofía who comes home after a long day of work to prepare dinner for her boyfriend. But a message on her answering machine changes her plans not only for the evening, but for the rest of her life. Zapata describes the movie as:

Ana historia de amor sobre la relación entre la ficción y la realidad. Siempre nos dijeron que contabamos historias para evadirnos de la realidad, pero no es cierto, contamos historias para transformar la realidad.

Not just reality, but more importantly, our memory. We’re not able to move on and to live comfortably until our conception of who we are and how we are treated is in line with how we view ourselves and view the world. Sofía must alter what she will remember before she is willing to accept what “happened”. And so do we all.

Fine, I admit it. I was listening to melancholy music. How could I not be; nostalgia and melancholy are as twisted together as Sunday morning lovers’ legs. First Palace Music and then Jose Gonzalez. With one hand on the steering wheel, the other clenched around the bleached hairs of my forearm, I floated 70 miles per hour through San Onofre’s nuclear limbo, where Camp Pendelton’s sage green marine base gives way to South Orange County’s cookie-cutter suburban Shangri-La.

Beyond the nuclear tits – an imaginative invitation to terrorists of any persuasion – a thin layer of afternoon, post-daylight-savings pink was sandwiched between the brooding white-capped Pacific Ocean and, above, a creeping cobweb of approaching sea fog. The three layers – flecked brownish-green, watermelon pink, and transparent steel gray – were as irreconcilable as my mood(s).

I was in San Diego for three days. My first time back since early August. On that last Indian Summer night before coming here to the Bay Area, an old friend of mine and I let our legs dangle from his balcony while we smoked a spliff, giggled like girls, and recounted stories from years ago. Of course they were only good memories. They always are. Nostalgia is not an act of remembering; it’s a process of forgetting, of filtering, or reconstructing your past as you wish it had occurred. Or, as it most conveniently fits into your present reality.

Passing by the toll road exit to Laguna Beach, I was aware that nostalgia had once again taken over my thoughts. We used to drive down that same canyon to the massive tree houses – surely torn down by now – and secret hillside cave that looked out onto … what are now subdivided developments. I tried to conjure up a bad memory – from high school, from college, from my childhood – but it was useless. Each time a hint of negativity rose to the surface, it was pushed back down again and replaced by a recollection decidedly more cheerful.

It’s very hard to put into words,” he said. “It’s probably the most frustrating thing that a person can ever go through, is to lose their identity. Because your past is what makes you who you are today – good or bad.

I can’t stop obsessing over the case of Jeff Ingram, a 40-year-old Canadian mill worker who woke up on the steps of a Denver building on September 10th with no wallet, no ID, and no idea of who he was. Though plenty of skepticism surrounds his case, most doctors are convinced that Ingram had experienced stress-related retrograde amnesia.

After walking around Denver’s streets for hours, Ingram found himself at the local police station where Detective Virginia Quinones helped get him on TV, eventually triggering a phone call from Ingram’s fiancee in Olympia, Washington.

Sit back and try to really picture this. You wake up one morning and you have absolutely no recollection of who you are. Then you are introduced to a woman or man who calls him/herself your fiancee and, presumably, shows you photographs to prove it. Your notion of who you are and what you have done with your life (both good and bad) is entirely dependent on what your fiancee, your friends, and your family decide to tell you.

Or, what if you are an avid blogger and you wake up one morning with complete amnesia? Most likely, the best record of who you are is what you have written. What would your weblog tell you about yourself if you read it without any recollection of who the person is who wrote it?

As it turns out, Ingram and his fiancee met online. According to the Lakeside Leader – the local paper of Ingram’s home town, Slave Lake:

Ingram met and married a woman in Slave Lake, a union that didn’t last. About three years ago he met Hansen online and they eventually became engaged to be married. He had “made quite a few trips to the States,” to spend time with her, Doreen says. The most recent visit started in March of this year, and ended with his departure for Slave Lake on Sept. 6. He’s back in Olympia with Hansen now. “He wants to stay in the States and be with his fiancée and that’s what she wants too,” Doreen says. 
Ingram doesn’t recognize her, but according to a report in ‘The Olympian’ newspaper, he feels a connection to Hansen.

Before Ingram fell in love with his fiancee for a second time, before he had any idea of who he was at all, the Denver Post published the following:

Maybe he’s an artist, perhaps a painter or a sculptor. He made a few sketches of the Denver skyline, and several people remarked about his talent. Maybe he’s connected to New York. The second day Al can remember was the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Al had a strong emotional reaction to the tributes he watched on TV. Maybe he had a family. Clues that came out during hypnosis and through the use of ‘truth serum’ suggest Al had a wife and two children, all of whom may have been killed by a drunken driver in April.

Talk about a blank slate. Had Ingram’s fiancee never called in, it’s quite plausible to imagine Ingram reinventing his life as a sculptor in New York with a new name, perhaps “Dante.” (why not?) Instead he returns to Olympia as a divorced former mill worker whose known for winning dart tournaments. I wonder which future would have brought the man more happiness and/or fulfillment.

While in San Diego I stayed with two friends, a married couple. In a conversation that has become as common as the weekend weather report, we got to talking about the impact of the internet on our lives. Half of the couple asked me if I was comfortable with my personal life archived and freely available for all to see online. “I don’t know, it would just be weird,” my friend went on, “if my kids were able to see photographs and get to know the people I dated before their parents got married.”

Personal history in public space can indeed be awkward. Mari and I had to reconcile our hypertextual pasts. And at times that means editing and deleting. Our online memory, it turns out, is not so distinct from our mental one. Except that we’re not always in control of what we remember.

I recently discovered the Flickr account of an ex-girlfriend of mine. My past was there for all to see and comment on – and I had no control of it. Nostalgia – or the art of convenient amnesia – isn’t possible when we’re inconvenienced by what we wish to forget.

Written on November 8th, 2006.