Previously, when I’ve written about belief, I’ve been interested in what we believe about the stories other people tell – what makes us believe autobiography and reject fantasy as fiction, for example.
But an equally important factor, particularly in our understanding of autobiography, is what the tellers of these stories believe about themselves.
In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Lewis Wolpert writes:
Memory can be viewed as a type of belief, not least because it can be unreliable. Indeed memory itself can be shaped by current beliefs. For example, in relationships, individuals’ recall of important events, especially those involving some sort of conflict, can be greatly at variance.
The idea that our memories are conditioned by what we think of ourselves in the present was a fundamental factor in my autobiographical memories project. I also had the idea that you could write about the same memory multiple times – possibly thousands of times – and each would tell a different story. This is still one of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write.
When we think of memory in these terms (as beliefs conditioned by the present), our personal histories become stories that we conjure up to explain the present. Our autobiographies explain the people we became, rather than existing as absolute records of our pasts.
But there is also this bizarre account of an inherited memory in Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter. The author recounts a story her own father, Idries Shah, had told to her – a memory of being a very small child riding an elephant in India.
Beneath the elephant’s lumbering tread, and as far as the eye can see, lush fields of sugar-cane stretch across the plain. Stooped figures – stunted and deformed by generations of under-nourishment – are cutting the cane in the glare of the sun. As he watches them, the child becomes aware for the first time that these, too, are human beings. His grandfather is with him on the elephant’s back. The old man reads the boy’s thoughts and answers his unspoken question: ‘Yes, we are oppressing these people. And mark my words: although they may seem to you now to be as weak and helpless as twigs, one day they will rise up and destroy us utterly.’
I assumed this was a literal memory. Then, years later, I found almost the same remark in the works of one of the great classical Persian poets, Sheikh Sa’adi of Shiraz. So now I can never be sure that my father really did sit on the back of that elephant, gazing across those endless plains. But because of that image, I will never forget Sa’adi’s words. The myths we choose to tell reflect the message we wish to preserve.
What was presented to Saira Shah as a personal heirloom, something she inherited from her father’s individual history, is in fact indistinguishable from her collective heritage – the myths of her people.
As I’ve said before, collective and individual stories alike often seek to tell where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Myths are stories of our past, that seek to explain how the world came to be how it is. In Shah’s account, such myths are indistinguishable from our autobiographical memories.