Effortless Entropy

Now, wait a minute, Doc. Are you trying to get me to actually believe that my crew, intergalactic engineers with years of hyperfission experience, have forgotten how to start the engines of this ship?

That’s right.

You … You’re serious?

Dead serious, Ira. Something, somehow, has caused them to forget how to start the engines.

We all know that the mind can play tricks. Freud built his whole theory on the belief that the mind can hide some truly monumental and uncomfortable truths from itself. If I knew his theories better I would perhaps have an explanation for the phenomena I am going to ruminate upon here. But I don’t. It probably isn’t so important and the fact is that what is being done by my particular mind is thankfully fairly inconsequential, if annoying. And that is this:

The forgetting of something until a few minutes after the last opportunity to do anything about it has passed.

Can this be deliberate? A sort of inner treachery, a wilful hiding of things from myself? A secret pact to forget or mislay something until just before the shit and the fan must meet.

So you’re half way to work and you remember the papers you were supposed to bring in; you pack the kids off to school and as the bus pulls away you remember their dinner money; or in my case today after turning the house upside down looking for my wallet, I find it less than 2 minutes after cancelling my cards.

In those examples it is perhaps not the forgetting that is perverse, but the remembering. The timing is crucial. It has a Schröedinger’s Cat quality about it. I can well imagine there is a me, in another universe, still blissfully ignorant of the fact that has just popped, quantum like, back into my mind.

I am assuming we are all like this and it’s not that I have some disease of the brain. My wife sometimes thinks I have. But there is a remarkable difference between our two brains and the way they work. She is a filer. She puts things in the place they belong. Somehow she can so categorize her environment/life as to have a place for everything. I don’t know how she does this as my world defies my attempts to classify it and instead morphs beyond my control. I have no problem with that. I do not expect to be in control. However my inability to put things here or there is equally matched most of the time by an ability to remember exactly were I left them. The memory is visual. And frustrated by my wife moving things to her designated places.

My wife’s ability to remember is not just aided by her filing system. It is mirrored by a clear chronological recall that can bring back the precise sequence of events going back years. This I am really jealous of. I am also its victim when I fail to recall pertinent details in our shared history. The flipside of it is her total lack of spacial and geographical memory. Together we are like the Uncertainty Principle. I can say where we went, but not when, and she when (and why), but not where, or where from.

But I can’t blame her for the wallet. That was all me. What I should have done was determined not to ring. I was 90% sure it would turn up. But the 10% that ran scenarios involving the wallet leaving my coat pocket by accident were more persuasive because of their burden of fear and dire consequences.

So what should I believe about this forgetting and remembering? Is it some subconscious urge to hide things from myself? Or a quantum event that either does or does not happen causing the Universe to split (according to the Many Worlds Theory)? Or should we blame aliens?

Of course it must be aliens …

So to our story about remembering. This is by Clifford D Simak. Predating Star Trek, it features a starship captain, his trusted mate with strange ears (only this is Bat Ears Brady, and he is anything but logical), and a ship’s doctor.

They get another showing in Courtesy with a less happy ending as the captain records in his final log. But in this story you have to love Bat Ears Brady whose drunken antics are very un-Spock-Like.

X Minus 1: Junkyard by Clifford D Simak. First published May 1953, Galaxy magazine.

Galaxy cover, May 1953