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Law in Contemporary Society
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Memory, Meaning, and Multiplicity-- By KianaTaghavi - 26 May 2025 I’ve always been intrigued by the ways our minds organize meaning and store memory--how certain days, sounds, scents, and moments latch on indefinitely. For me, there’s something about Tuesdays that offsets my poor memory. Tuesdays tend to be polarizing. Some people dread them even more than Mondays; some appreciate their distinct cadence; the Greeks considered them unlucky; and other cultures recognized their spiritual force. Many of my Tuesdays are inscribed with markers that have found an abode in an accessible mental chamber, making for easy recall. I’ve never not had a class on a Tuesday. Elections fall on Tuesdays. My college friend’s senseless ski accident happened on a Tuesday. My first heartbreak blindsided me on a Tuesday evening. Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (Wear Sunscreen) singles out a random Tuesday (and is a song of which I often think fondly). I struggle with a faulty memory. It thus feels meaningful to find ways to chart baseline connections, such as between a day of the week and a formative moment, even the more mundane ones. I think this tendency originates from being a relationally-oriented person, in the sense that as more of my memories and associations sync, my sense of being expands. And through that metaphysical expansion, I have the capacity to feel more emotions. Of course, one could say that all of this is an activity in intellectual futility masked as insight. Or maybe it’s not that deep at all, and memory markers, however they manifest, serve a practical function to the person creating and experiencing them. For myself, memory has informed, interrogated, and imparted intuitions into my sense of self and identity. It therefore feels like the most critical aspect of my identity, over which I fear losing control. I try to mitigate some of this fear through various quirks. People turn to myriad self-help tools to navigate their worlds, which are frequently entrenched in notions of convenience, consumption, and curation. Some people lean into identity curation to find internal peace, while others immerse themselves in the convenience of technology and social media. Possessing a consistent and complete identity is burdensome, so I imagine that’s why I’ve developed my own mechanisms, like shorthand memory markers, to capture moments too complex for communication or articulation. I don’t always remember, but I feel the weight of these moments, which are stored somewhere only the human mind and heart can hold. I coexist with these markers. They surface in moments of reinforcement: a Tuesday afternoon, Spotify shuffling on, reluctantly doing [something], oscillating between conclusory thoughts, and oh, if Bon Entendeur plays next, then I was right about [conclusory thought #1]… Perhaps there’s a cosmic pity that feeds me these stimuli, and I feel silly for this, but I find myself more often than not interpreting these external cues as affirmation of what I had long arrived at. Shuffled playlists, Twitter posts, or song lyrics give me the opportunity to play psychic, though sometimes I’m able to use bilateral moments to entertain this self-fulfilling cycle of thought-processing. I once saw a West Village psychic, though I prefer sporadic, serendipitous moments of reinforcement than artificially organized and ‘legitimized’ ones. I guess that feeds some version of an ego battling naïveté, routine, autonomy, and deference. The multiplicity of identity can coexist with, and within, the rational self. My rational self depends on those magical moments when music and mind temporally match, as much as on logic and practicality. This tension is illuminated in the work of psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg, who reimagines the self not as a singular, unified structure, but as an amalgamation of discontinuous self-states. In Standing in the Spaces, Bromberg writes: “A human being's ability to live a life with both authenticity and self-awareness depends on the presence of an ongoing dialectic between separateness and unity of one's self-states, allowing each self to function optimally without foreclosing communication and negotiation between them.” Bromberg treats the unconscious mind as an operation of a dialectical process rather than a unidirectional one. This idea resonates with one of my deepest internal obstacles: the veneration of linearity. Tangible, discrete, sequential steps of progress are my metric of fulfillment. I shouldn’t be surprised that I rarely feel meaningful durations of fulfillment. We are taught that fulfillment is a feeling, not a feat, but we also learn that fulfillment at its best is relational. So of course there is an inkling of betrayal when relationships collapse and there is no more part that is worthy of being whole. And suddenly, fulfillment only becomes ever so much as fleeting. It’s therefore refreshing to read Bromberg’s interventions because he affirms that nonlinearity is as essential to a ‘healthy’ sense of self as that which the unitary forces of logic, pragmatism, and convenience create. Having surrendered my anxiety to the machine [of logic, of pragmatism], the anxiety transforms into occupation. I take sincere refuge in logical and pragmatic structures of thought and of relation. These structures are stabilizing, but I wonder if they ironically reproduce the very unease they’re meant to countervail. I endeavor to make sense of my observations and connect them, linearly, logically, analytically, and relationally. But rather than accept them, without judgment, the machine turns on. To invoke Bromberg, the ongoing negotiations inside me are the functional equivalent of preoccupation, which I conflate with self-preservation. I often wonder where interiority ends and self-preservation begins. At its most reductive, interiority is peace through self-awareness and self-sufficiency. But maybe interiority has been weaponized into occupation by the national project of self-care and self-help. Maybe that’s what triggers my entire psychology of pattern-seeking. We began with Tuesdays, and along the way, I’ve integrated music, trauma, self-preservation, and theory, hoping to make sense of how I remember and why that matters. If Bromberg is correct that the self is a set of selves, always negotiating, always incomplete, then perhaps these small memory markers are less about preservation and more about permission: to be nonlinear, to be inconsistent, and to be both fractured and whole.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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