I flashed on Deacon last night in my clutches, my questions to him coming angrily as accusations. He knew nothing about any Totality of Salvation, did he? Why, I had already figured that out, had I not? That when I drifted to Earth, in my fantasy, as Saint William Randolph, I had to leave behind a certain Heavenly Knowledge. One can remember an event, an action, a person, a place, a feeling, a procedure, a line of verse, a melody, or a person’s name. One can remember doing such and such, seeing such and such, or thinking such and such. And one can remember where something is, when a certain event happened, why something happened, who did a certain thing, how to do something, and how something looks, sounds, or feels. Although memory is commonly said to be of the past, one can remember facts about the future (I just remembered that there will be a meeting tomorrow), facts about the present (I just remembered that the debate is going on right now), scientific laws and generalizations, and timeless truths of logic and mathematics. What in the name of Heaven is going on? A stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I had never felt anything quite like it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

Deacon was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form. I felt his strength recede, and his eyes misted. A glowing fire was quelled, and I had not done it, and an ever-present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present. Behind me the ghost whispered contemptuously, “You are not a gentleman, you never were!” I muttered all the obscenities I knew in French and English in a tight whisper. Some people seem to view eternity as a continual existence through time, but others believe it is a timeless present. Despite the variety of uses, philosophers writing on memory have tended, until recently, to concentrate on those uses of “remember” in which it takes its object an expression referring to a particular past event or action. While they have paid some attention to memory of facts (memory that such and such), they have generally restricted this attention to memory of facts about remembering events. Thus they have tended to ignore, or rule out of consideration, cases in which the fact remembered is about the remote past (for example, the fact that Brutus stabbed Caesar), or about the future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

For to say that a person remembers an event (and hence to say that he or she remembers a fact about an event, or otherwise came to know of it, at the time of its occurrence, and this implication limits the possible objects of event-memory to past events and actions occurring within the lifetime of the rememberer. And of course it is only such events and actions that one can remember having witnessed or done. I went up high in the air. I traveled fast—faster than a ghost, or so I figured. I drifted about the city of Rocklin, lulled by its lights and its voiced. I wondered how Ava would handle this power, if she would be weeping again. I let myself believe there were no ghosts who could touch me up here or anywhere if I used all my considerable powers, no ghosts who could make me afraid. I said No to hunger. I said to thirst Be still. I slipped down silently into the realm of my fellow creatures. I caught sight of Deacon in the driveway, pulling behind him a pile of suitcases, all dependent upon one huge rectangular bag equipped with excellent little wheels. He was whistling a melody by Chopin and walking very briskly, and I fell into stride beside him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

 “You are the most dashing man on the street, Little Brother,” I said. “What is with all the suitcases?” “Are you going to let us stay at the house, Beloved Boss?” he asked. His eyes were fired with love. In our short acquaintance, I had never seen him so happy. In fact, I had never seen him happy before at all. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do we crowd you? Do you want us out?” “Not at all, I want you there,” I replied. “I should have told you.” We walked along together, me trying to keep up with his long legs.  Ava was in the bedroom, working on the computer we bought at Sunset, first thing she had to have. She was recording every experience, every sensation, every subtle distinction, ever revelation. The notion of the past enters into the notion of memory in another way, for it is true in general that remembering involves having previously learned or acquired knowledge of what one remembers. However, it should not be supposed that when a person is said to remember a fact about an event in the remote past or the future—that is, about an event to which one cannot have been a witness—what one really remembers is learning (for example, reading or being told) that fact; it commonly happens that one remembers a fact without having any recollection of the occasion on which one learned it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

Memory of acts (what has been called factual memory) cannot be reduced to memory of events experienced or witnessed by the rememberer (what has been called personal memory), and not all cases of factual memory are cases in which the remembered fact is a fact about a remembered event or action. However, the concealing memory may be connected with the impression it conceals, not only through its contents, but also through contiguity of time; this is the contemporaneous or contiguous concealing memory. How large a portion of the sum total of our memory belongs to the category of concealing memories, and what part it plays in various neurotic hidden processed, these are problems into the value of which I have neither inquired, nor shall I enter here. I am concerned only with the emphasizing the sameness between the forgetting of proper names with faulty recollection and the formation of concealing memories. At first sight, it would seem that the diversities of both phenomena are far more striking than their exact analogies. There we deal with proper names, here with complete impressions experienced either in reality or in thought; there we deal with a manifest failure of the memory function, here with a momentary disturbance—for the name just forgotten could have been reproduced correctly a hundred times before, and will be so again from tomorrow on. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Here we deal with lasting possession without a failure, for the indifferent childhood memories seem to be able to accompany us through a great part of life. In both these cases, the riddle seems to be solved in an entirely different way. There is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering which excites our scientific curiosity. It was fun walking along the street again. Feet on the Summer pavements with the heat of the Sun still rising from them. Reese was talking about how she wished she could get rid of some female. I pondered the matter, perhaps for the first time. A body could not survive being dumped in the Honey Island Swamp in the Pearl River Wildlife area. Too many gators. It made me smile bitterly to remember that once others had tried to dispose of me in just the same way. But this poor dead female had lacked my resources when she tumbled down into darkness. Her soul had fled to the Totality of Salvation, of course. We walked on together through a crush of valiant tourists. The town was drippingly hot. Local legend has it that Honey Island Swamp in Louisiana scares people who dare to venture down the road after nightfall and park along the road, reports claim ghost, believed to be slaves from nearby plantations, may jostle vehicles and leave their handprints on windows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

The temperatures in the area are said to drop, an indication of a paranormal presence. This swamp is also the home of the legendary Honey Island Swamp monster, which has from time to time been known as the Tainted Keitre. The creature is described as bipedal, seven feet (over two meters tall), with gray hair and yellow eyes. The story goes that a four-story mansion of antebellum fashion once stood on the land in the 1870s, the owner was notorious for beating the enslaved people, both African Americans and European Americans. There was speculation that he was from a race of slave masters from another planet. One day, Charles Deslondes, on the 1882-acre plantation, tried to convince the master to stop beating them leaving deep scars in their backs, and if he would be their friend they would tell him something that might change his life. The slaves warned that he should watch his wife at night because they  found a wild boar with its throat gashed out. The evening after the owner received the message, the couple went to bed as usual and the wife, near midnight, slipped outside into the rain to sneak below to the home’s prison to visit the slaves. As the slave she was fond of moved to embrace her, you could hear the chains restricting him rattle in the night air. The next morning, he was hanged high on one of the property’s 500-year-old oak tree and buried below it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

Years later, the house sank with the owner, Manuel Andry in it. Legend has it that he was eaten alive by gators and the property turned into a swamp. No records survive to tell us what Charles said the final minutes before the mansion sank, but some suspect he used a powerful voodoo curse and that Manel Andry some how became the swamp monster we hear about these days. Here we seal with lasting possession without a failure, for the indifferent childhood memories seem to be able to accompany us through a great part of life. The riddle seems to be solved in an entirely different way. There it is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering which excites out scientific curiosity. After deeper reflection, one realized that, although there is a diversity in the psychic material and in the duration of time of the two phenomena, yet these are by far outweighed by the conformities between the two. We deal with the failure of remembering; what should be correctly reproduced by memory fails to appear, and instead something else comes as a substitute. We are justified in saying that the diversities in material, in duration of time, and in the centering of both phenomena serve to enhance our expectation, that we have discovered something that is important and of general value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

This generality purports that the stopping and straying of the reproductioning function indicates more often than we suppose that there is an intervention of a prejudicial factor, a tendency which favors one memory and, at the same time, works against another. The subject of childhood memories appears to me so important and interesting.  What vibe did you get in your secret soul? Good ghost? Bad ghost? Hmm, well, good, obviously. Trying to tell us we have Andry genes. Trying to save us, trying to keep us from breeding some awful mutations, which occurs now and then in the family. A benign ghost. I have told you the whole story. A benign ghost and an awful mutation. Has Reese mentioned the mutation? The lost child? Then I stretched out on my bed. Satin tufted tester above me. Satin counterpane below. Fairly shadowy. I turned my face into the down pillows, of which I always had a sizeable heap, and with all my muscles sort of scrunched up against the modern World. I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find it in a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. Yet, in spite of this unparalleled effectiveness they were forgotten! This would suggest that there are particularly formed conditions of memory (in the sense of conscious reproduction) which have thus far eluded our knowledge. It is quite possible that the forgetting of childhood may give us the key to understanding of those amnesias which, according to our newer studies, are possessed at the basis of the formation of all neurotic symptoms. Suddenly, there was an agitation in me so greater that only lying alone, scrunched up on the bed, could comfort me. Sleep. Sleep, but I could not. And I had to see if the ghost would come. A clock ticked somewhere. A clock with a painted face and curlicue hands. Not a huge clock. A clock that with its whole soul knew only how to tick and might tick for centuries, maybe had ticked for centuries, a clock to which people would look, and which people would dust, and which people wound with a key, and which people might come to love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

There was a clock somewhere in this house, perhaps in the back parlor, the only piece of all this furniture that could talk. I heard it. I knew what it was saying. Its code was lovely to me. Of these retained childhood reminiscences, some appear to us readily comprehensible, while others seem strange or unintelligible. It is not difficult to correct certain in regard to both kinds. If the retained reminiscences of a person are subject to an analytic test, it can be readily ascertained that a guarantee for their correctness does not exist. Some of the memory pictures are surely falsified and incomplete, or displaced in point of times and place. The assertions of persons examined, that their first memories reach back perhaps to their second year, are evidently unreliable. Motives can soon be discovered which explain the disfigurement and the displacement of these experiences, but they also demonstrate that these memory lapses are not the result of a mere unreliable memory. Powerful forces from a later period have moulded the memory capacity of our infantile experiences, and it is probably due to these same forces that the understanding of our childhood is generally so very strange to us. The recollection of adults, as is known, proceeds through different psychic material. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

 Some recall by means of visual pictures—their memories are of a visual pictures—their memories are of a visual character; other individuals can scarcely reproduce in memory the partly sketch of an experience; we call such persons auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuels. These differences vanish in dreams; all our dreams are preponderatingly visual. However, this development is also found in the childhood memories; the latter are plastic and visual, even in those people whose later memory lacks the visual element. The visual memory, therefore, preserves the type of the infantile recollections. Only my earliest childhood memories are of a visual character; they represent plastically depicted scenes, comparable only to stage settings. “And it was by  faith that these three disciples obtained a promised that they should not taste of death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad,” reports Ether 12.17-19. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12