evidentiary:alchemy

But unlike a document, the soil of an archaeological site can be interpreted only once in the state in which it is found. The very process of excavation destroys a site forever ... - from the Smithsonian (click text to visit site)

Recently, a friend confessed that her memoirs had replaced her actual memories - her original impressions, images, interpretations, and emotions overwritten by the revisions stored on her laptop hard drive.  Notebook scribbles, structured paragraphs, aestheticized dialogue. These are her reality now. 

"I will be telling a story," she said. "And my husband will stop me.  That is not what happened, he will say.  That is what you wrote."

This is not to say her memoirs lie.  Rather, it points to the ways in which essays are shaped - formally, aesthetically, emotionally, and otherwise.  Creative nonfiction writers do not merely retrieve and record the artifacts of their lives, digging them out from the sediment and arranging them for display.  They imbue them with meaning.  In order to create that meaning, they reshape the emotional, psychological, or temporal contexts.  Subtle as this process may be, it is also extremely powerful. 

But something even more fundamental - more powerful - is revealed by my friend's story.  When original memories are replaced by our crafted ones, what does this mean?  Just like in archaeology, the site is destroyed by our own digging.  Forever altered. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Even without writing, our memories are reshaped all the time.  As we change and mature, our memories change, too - in nuance, emotional tenor, intensity.  But the fact that we can destroy our own dig sites does imply a certain ethical responsibility - to both ourselves and others.  Dig sites must be destroyed for some purpose - to ask important questions or discover a long-hidden truth (whether that be personal, social, political, historical, or aesthetic.)   

If we can do this, then all our lost memories will be worth it.