The Cow Who Came Back

Technorati Tag(s): Personal, Memory, Opinion

One of my earliest memories (perhaps the earliest) is of playing with the head of a cow.

A rubber cow with a cowbell. About the size of a man's fist.

You could squeeze it.

How old was I then? Nine months? Five years? I don't remember.

Years later I bought an Archie Comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic digest, and in one of its stories, an inter-dimensional cow head transports the four turtles to another dimension. That head pretty much resembled my memories of the squeezable cow, and when I first saw that comic book cow I had a flashback that was shocking in its exactness. I don't think I missed out on any detail in that flashback. I saw myself on my back squeezing the head. I remembered the smell of Jasmine flowers, though back when I was that child holding the head, I didn't know their name. I remembered soft light from a bulb, partially blocked by a wall.

The impact of that auditory, olfactory vision was so huge I began wondering, if one event can leave such a perfect imprint in your memory, then why can't every moment do so?

I read somewhere that when you say you don't remember something, it's because you never remembered it. You never really stored it. It didn't leave an imprint. You filtered it out; assigned it an unimportant status.

I think, though, that we cannot possibly filter anything out. We let everything in. We only filter our sense of recall. That is, we set our filter when we're looking for something in our databanks, not while we're storing something. I have no proof regarding this, at least not yet.

Where the mind is concerned, though, literally anything is possible.