Tonight, I received an extraordinarily strange inquiry, via myspace (of all avenues):
My first reaction was to laugh. Really, I mean, what the hell was this dude talking about? And I posted this to Twitter:
Actual email rec’d: “I’m researching the ‘memory eraser’ drug propranolol & came across your comments.” Uh, WHAT comments? I can’t remember!
And really, I couldn’t. But it rang a sort of distant bell, and tonight after I’d showered and gone to bed (intending to set a record of sleeping for two nights in a row, after last night’s unusual success), it finally hit me, where it was I might have made comments about this medication, and I sat bolt upright and headed for the computer. (And therefore, in all likelihood, cursed my chances of sleeping tonight.)
Back in November of 2006, my friend Chris had posted an article to his blog, “Propranolol, The Memory Pill.” He discussed a segment on Propranolol he’d seen on 60 Minutes:
Propranolol is a beta blocker that is sometimes used in the treatment of hypertension and migraines. The Sixty Minutes segment The Memory Pill looked at its use for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome. Apparently, one of its effects is to lessen the intensity and immediacy of traumatic memories. Various patients… showed astounding improvement after years– even decades– of suffering from severe PTSD…
Chris goes on to speculate about both the promise and the potential pitfalls of such a biochemical solution to what are, ultimately, both sociological and psychological problems. And I, apparently, left some lengthy comments:
This is fascinating and terrifying. Certainly, I’d love to be less impaired than I presently am by posttraumatic stress. In the last two years of being forced to reopen all manner of proverbial “worm cans” by the truckload, my basic functioning as a human being is markedly worse than during the period that preceded this one, during which I was just stuffing it all.
But all of one’s memories, even the horrific ones, are precious, and I’d be a shell of myself without an intact power of recall.
If a magic bullet type of pill were out there that muted the debilitating effects of posttraumatic stress, without actually impairing or altering memory in any way - something that perhaps made memories easier to work with, I’d be the first one to sign up for it, but I can’t imagine there could be such a convenient shortcut through all the horror and rot of it. (”The only way out is through” and all that…)
Chris replied:
I don’t know… judging from the people they interviewed, that’s exactly what this drug does– it doesn’t alter the memory– they can still recall everything– it just makes it less immediate/threatening/overwhelming.
I responded at length concerning my past travails with medications I have taken (while also participating in psychotherapy) for PTSD and anxiety (in addition to bipolar and ADD), expressing definite skepticism, but finally concluding:
…if there is something out there that could help to facilitate me getting through this particular impasse of late, without fucking me up further in the process, I might have to overcome my reluctance and try it.
Okay, a few things:
First, this still seems to me like some wacko science fiction, instantly evoking The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, perhaps my second-favorite movie out of the last five years (after Magnolia, which also addressed highly volatile matters of memory). The plot revolves around a fictional process of “targeted memory erasure,” undertaken in response to personal trauma, and its surreal and ultimately devastating (but also illuminating) consequences.
It’s a tempting idea. And certainly, I have no shortage of profoundly traumatic memories that affect my daily ability to function (impairments one might not immediately sense from my writing, but which, alas, you would if you lived with me).
But it also strikes me as inherently and profoundly dangerous. When so much has been taken from me, and my capacity for memory (however traumatic in nature that memory may be) is all the power I have in the world, what consequences could arise from monkeying with the brain chemistry that keeps those memories encoded?
Finally, there is the oddity of this: That some comments I’d made more than a year and a half ago on someone else’s blog could come back to me today, A) via my profile at myspace, of all things (uh, dude, if you’d followed my blog link from there, and thus found my dedicated contact page here, I’m not really sure why you went with the myspace route rather than regular email, but okay!), and B) I could scarcely remember having made the comments in the first place.
Memory’s weird. I could recount in vivid detail, for example, things that happened to me on April 13, 1984, or on September 11, 1993 (among other historically traumatic “September 11s”), but right now? Damned if I could tell you where my driver’s license is, what I did with the tax forms it turns out I’m going to have to refile because of an IRS error, or my keys.
Such is the nature of the beast. And it is a beast. But is it a beast I want to disturb, or attempt to neuter in some way? Would I be better able to use my existing memories for the purposes of writing (which, besides taking care of my family, is really the only purpose I have left that hasn’t been inexorably wrecked), if they weren’t so traumatically charged? Or would the writing itself also be “neutered” if I did that?
It’s a tough and terrifying question. If a means existed whereby I could blunt my traumatic responses without altering the memories that first gave rise to them (and this qualification is critical), it stands to reason that I could be far more productive as a writer than I presently am, rather than less so. I could do more works of sustained narrative prose, rather than poems (which is not to discount the value of poems; it just happens that for me, poems are often “placeholders” for more deeply necessary, deferred works of prose).
Or the very notion of this medical “solution” to the problem of traumatic memory (whether in fiction or in presently accepted and/or developing medical practice) is a dangerous mirage, an attempt at cosmic “cheating” most likely to end in ruin.