Memory

A bigger more complex brain extends memory. The Homo sapiens mother recognizes one twin from the other, the 'gator mom, the ostrich mom, just has a bunch of little gator/ostriches behind her: switch in her neighbors', she won't know. or care.

Then we develop speech, then writing. Now we know precisely what was published as Twain, imprecisely what Shakespeare wrote (though precisely what was published AS Shakespeare), precisely what was published as Jesus, very imprecisely what Jesus might actually have said. And nothing at all of what Eve might have said 150,000 years ago. (But we sure know precisely, just recently, how her genes were different!)

I can know exactly, typos and all, what I emailed my son under my current MacMail. I have a clear memory of what I wrote to Ivan Illich in 1970, but no carbon. I remember, but more fuzzily, what my mother said to my grandfather after his cancer when I was a kid.

Once upon a time we knew what our mother looked like now and also had a fuzzy memory of how she looked when we were an infant. Then comes photography. Most people's snaps are brown and yellow and then nonexistent within a few years. Suddenly, at the museum, there's a good print from Lewis Carroll! Victorian!

Guy like me has a clear memory, photo assisted, of periods going back to the mid-19th C. I "remember" Carroll, Brady, Lartigue,
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Boulougne
Cartier-Bresson ... Melies, Lillian Gish, Chaplin, WC Fields ... My actual life I remember more in the fuzzy style common to all moderns: some photos etc, but we sure don't know that many of them.

I have my own memories of Burt Lancaster, like my memories of my mother. Then there are the films-photos themselves. I artificially remember Burt when he was young, did trapeze work. My memory of Atlantic City, Burt old, is clear.

Now for the first time I watch Local Hero, 1983. Burt is old. Fine: I'd know him anywhere, any age. But then there's this twerp in the movie. Good god, it's that guy from Animal House!
Suddenly I have a "clear" memory of Animal House with this twerpy kid. I look him up at IMDb (Peter Riegert) . He's old! He did a million movies I didn't see! He grew old without me! He lived with Bette Midler and I didn't know.

What insanity to mix clear with fuzz, verifiable documents with unverifiable documents ... 

Then again I bet a worm has some sort of impressions: some clear, some fuzzy, some verifiable, some just ghosts.