Editorial: Thoughts on The Meaning of Memory

One of my favourite essays is The Meaning of Memory by George Lipsitz, included in Nick Browne's collection American Television. Meaning is about television sitcom families in the fifties that were designed to appeal to working-class families but also the essay is about how American television built a monopoly and escaped regulation. The final sentence of the essay is particularly powerful, "only by understanding the past can we hope to end its pain". I've thought so much about that sentence. The irony is that now I've finished university, abandoned my PhD, and gone out into the real world, I think I understand it. That's what this blog is for. Understanding pain. By understanding my own writing, I can hope understand pain, both my own pain and that which I've inflicted.

Earlier today I was in a hairdressers' waiting to get my haircut and sat on a couch by a glass fish tank. The tank depicted a downed underwater plane and had fish swimming in and out its ruins. I recalled the story a goldfish's mind is so small, it loses all memory when it completes a single rotation around a tank. That, in turn, brought me to David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech, "What the hell is water?" about an amusing fish joke, and how fish don't understand the real world. If they don't have memories, why of course they don't.